The Blackout

The Blackout (Avanpost, 2019) is a Russian sci-fi action film by Egor Baranov, available to watch online on iFILM. Contact with most of the planet cuts out overnight; from orbit, cosmonauts spot a dark ring over Eastern Europe with power still flickering inside it.

A military unit pushes past the edge of that circle and finds cities frozen mid-motion — abandoned cars, empty hospitals, every sign that life ended in seconds. A surviving garrison near Moscow becomes humanity's last outpost, and its soldiers have to work out what is wiping out everything beyond the lit zone. The cast includes Pyotr Fyodorov, Alexey Chadov, Svetlana Ivanova, Konstantin Lavronenko and Yura Borisov.

Running two and a half hours, it pairs large-scale firefights with a sharp twist behind the catastrophe, a rare swing at full-blown sci-fi from Russian cinema. It lands best with fans of grim, military-flavored post-apocalypse. Stream The Blackout (2019) online on iFILM.