The stylised drama directed by Kirill Serenblennikov pushed the audio-visual experience of cinema to a limit.  A pill of aspirin manufactured in 1977 Soviet Union rationalizes the dazzling techniques and mise-en-scene. The director deliberately fragments and reassembles the storylines in a stream-of-consciousness manner to elicit a confusion of past and present, of illusions and reality, of life and death. The audience is subjected to a cycle of conjecture, negation and delirium in the journey packed with psychopaths, murder and aliens.

The story unfolds on a crowded ancient bus that is Soviet-style. The sequence shot ensures the unity of time and space. But interestingly, the shot doesn’t seem to reflect the concrete duration but resembles a collage of Russian politics in the 1990s. The aspect ratio of 2.35: 1 includes numerous overwhelming elements that distract us from Petrov, who is at the same time overburdened by the surroundings. The opening shot is static with the ticket seller standing in the foreground (it is a medium close-up) before the protagonist is revealed in a medium shot. Nevertheless, the introduction is transitory. Before the audience shifts the attention from the surroundings to the protagonist, passengers squeeze forward, resulting in a movement in-depth, speeding up the rhyme. As the plump woman moves to the end of the bus, Petrov leans his body on the left seat to set aside space. The camera remains in the centre of the corridor, which means the protagonist has passed the left one-third grid line on the camera. Petrov attempts to restore his position in the centre of the screen but intercepted by a middle-aged man striking up a conversation about welfare which the protagonist doesn’t seem to care about (as he lowers his head with discomfort and nearly coughs his lungs out). Following the actions of the man taking a seat on the right of the corridor, the camera pans rightward slightly leaving Petrov on the centre-left of the screen. The toplight on the cell casts the silhouette of Petrov, creates chiaroscuro and lights up the space behind him, in which the ticket seller is chatting with several passengers, competing with ongoing conversations in the foreground and the motionless Petrov for the audience’s attention. The blatant atmosphere contrasts with the conditions of the protagonist, who is suffering from the flu and decides that conversations and arguments with others are too much for him.

The second part of the sequence shot is full of hysteria. The bus was suddenly stopped, and the camera pans violently to the bus door, where a mob drags Petrov down the vehicle. The light is extinguished when a masked man holding a gun threatens the passengers and relit when Petrov was handed a gun. As Petrov is the only victim, it’s reasonable to speculate that this is an illusion of the protagonist and the flickering light symbolises a shift in time and locations. What’s more, the internal rhythm accelerates significantly as the politicians and oligarchs kidnapped are executed. The camera pans over 180 degrees between the victims and the marshalled mobs with the stability of the camera decreasing. It seems like the execution of this shot has shifted from applying Steadicam to handholding the camera. Bullets and flash bombs shuffle through the air, causing constantly changing lighting ratio, along with the non-diegetic metallic music and drum beats, creating dazzling visual effects and a disturbing atmosphere.

The dialogues of the characters in the sequence shot are full of xenophobia, and dissatisfaction toward a government ruled by corrupted politicians like Yeltsin, who colluded with the oligarchs under the disguise of democracy. Passengers seem to be filled with anger. When a 9-year-old girl gives her seat to an old scholar, the elderly lectures his misogynistic and Stalinist beliefs by comparing the little girl to her peers in Afghanistan and India, who he assumes must have already married and cheated on their husbands. Such speech triggers the anger of a young man. Later, the scholar is dragged down the bus and is executed. Passengers seem to have a problem with the selfish scholars who constantly propose technocratic interpretations of every aspect of people’s lives to stop the public from participating in affairs. What’s more, people offer their opinions towards the decrescent welfare after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It’s hardly believable that the sequence shot objectively documents a series of events that happen in reality as the structure seems so well-polished and the narrative so surreal to provide a precise overview and analysis of people’s attitudes towards Russian politics. However, the sequence shot provides an illusion that the absurd and highly impossible event is real, just as everything is an illusion in Petrov’s mind. The unity of time and space enables the audience to know that at one the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is truly cinema. The ebb and flow of imagination are fed by reality. Therefore the audience is encouraged to actively reflect and interpret the story in a real context.