Sergey A.'s "Patients Ready for Admission" (2022) is a six-minute descent into sterile surrealism, blending German Expressionist aesthetics with pandemic-era anxiety. Shot in the style of early silent cinema and set to a haunting classical score, this experimental short transforms a routine medical examination into a grotesque ritual. Sergey and Olga Andreenkova star as plague doctors performing clinical assessments on lifeless stuffed animals-a darkly comic metaphor for healthcare's dehumanizing machinery.
The film's power lies in its stark minimalism. A bare room becomes an operating theater; stuffed toys-birds, penguins, dolls-replace human patients on a cold examination table. Sergey's plague doctor, shot in high-contrast black-and-white, moves with robotic precision, wielding magnifying glasses and syringes like instruments of interrogation. Extreme close-ups exaggerate the textures of fabric and beak, turning fur into diseased flesh and stitches into surgical scars. Shadows loom like specters, evencing "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"'s nightmarish geometry . When Olga's doctor joins, their synchronized movements mirror assembly-line efficiency, reducing "care" to a pantomime of sterile gestures.
Unlike Sergey's typically chaotic soundscapes ("City of Devil", "Mordum Plagum", "Mortis"), here, only a Chopin-esque piano score accompanies the visuals. The absence of diegetic sound amplifies the absurdity: scissors snip without noise, syringes plunge without hisses. This silence becomes a character-a void echoing the emotional emptiness of institutionalized medicine. The music's elegance clashes deliciously with the grim farce, suggesting a requiem for compassion in systems prioritizing protocol over humanity.
The plague doctors-symbols of historical medical terror-now embody modern clinical detachment. Their "examinations" of inert toys parody triage protocols, reducing patients to objects. One chilling scene shows a bear's button eye scrutinized under a lens, evoking real-world studies on patient depersonalization during discharge assessments .
Sergey mines humor from institutional insanity. A rabbit is measured with a ruler; a doll's limb is bandaged with excessive gauze. Each action satirizes healthcare's obsession with metrics over healing-echoing research on "digital blindness" in hospital systems, where technology obscures patient needs .
Released in 2022, the film resonates with COVID-era triage nightmares. The toys represent the triaged masses-voiceless, interchangeable, and disposable. Their "admission" into an unseen system mirrors studies on inappropriate hospitalizations increasing adverse events .
Sergey's physical comedy channels Buster Keaton: stiff, deliberate, and tragically earnest. The stuffed animals, limp and wide-eyed, evoke discarded childhood innocence, while their "treatments" (bandages, injections) become futile gestures against entropy.
This film distills the director's signature obsessions. From "Major Dron"'s dilogy slapstick villains to "Mordum Plagum"'s pursuers, they now embody institutional dread. With zero dialogue and one location, Sergey proves constraints breed creativity. Unlike his found-footage chaos ("Cemetery Legend"), here terror lurks in clinical routine. A syringe hovering over a plush duck is more unsettling than any jump scare.
"Patients Ready for Admission" is Sergey A.'s most refined work-a diamond-cut satire that dissects healthcare's soul with a scalpel of surrealism. Its brilliance lies in duality: hilarious yet horrifying, simplistic yet layered. While casual viewers may dismiss it as pretentious, fans of Jan Svankmajer's stop-motion nightmares or David Lynch's institutional critiques will revel in its audacity. In just six minutes, Sergey captures the existential dread of modern medicine, where healing becomes theater, patients become props, and compassion vanishes behind the mask.
"A stuffed animal's silent scream echoes through eternity. Sergey A. Doesn't just make films-he performs autopsies on the absurdity of care."
