Altered

The Mechanics of Survival

There’s a particular sadness to post-Soviet brutalism, the kind that seems trapped in the concrete itself. I felt it right away in Timo Vuorensola’s *Altered*, which uses the very real skyline of Astana, Kazakhstan, as a stand-in for a splintered near future. It’s a smart piece of casting by location for a film obsessed with class walls that do not budge. Vuorensola, the man behind the gloriously silly *Iron Sky*, is reaching for something much more earnest this time. He doesn’t fully land it, at least not all the way, but the reach matters. There’s real scrappy conviction in the attempt.

In this alternate 2025, the split is genetic. The rich are enhanced at birth and become "Genetics." Everyone else gets filed under "Special"—a chillingly polite label for the unmodified, the disabled, the disposable. The allegory is familiar enough that you can hear *Gattaca* and *Elysium* rattling around in the walls. What gives it some texture is that Vuorensola plants the whole thing in a grimy underground workshop instead of a shiny corporate lab.



That’s where Leon comes in, played by Tom Felton. For a lot of viewers, Felton’s face is still hardwired to Draco Malfoy’s aristocratic sneer. Seeing him age into a paraplegic mechanic clawing out a life in the slums is quietly startling. He doesn’t lean on saintliness. Leon isn’t noble; he’s worn down. Felton uses posture more than dialogue, folding himself over workbenches, moving with the clipped economy of someone who has calculated the cost of every motion. He feels like a man who has spent years learning exactly how much labor simple survival requires in a world built to leave him behind.

The emotional core sits in Leon’s patched-together family with his teenage assistant Chloe (Elizaveta Bugulova). Their bond isn’t dressed up with speeches. It lives in routine: hand over the wrench, check the door, hide the illegal hardware. Bugulova gives Chloe a sharp, watchful edge that keeps the relationship from getting syrupy. Once the plot shoves them out of their little bunker and into conflict with a corrupt politician played by Richard Brake, the film pivots from intimate character work into straight genre action.



That pivot is where *Altered* starts rattling. The world-building arrives in rushed voiceovers, and some of the dialogue sounds like it survived one too many passes through a translation app. Douglas Davidson of *Elements of Madness* called the film "both underbaked and overcooked," which feels dead on. At 85 minutes, it blows past its own mythology so fast you can almost see entire missing episodes. There’s a denser, slower television season buried in here somewhere, trying to claw its way out.

Still, even with all the clumsy exposition, the movie has one sequence that really sticks. Cornered and desperate, Leon interfaces with a stolen biomechanical spine, a prototype exosuit that will let him walk and fight at enormous physical cost. Vuorensola does not stage this like a superhero birth. The camera stays locked on Felton’s face. His jaw tightens. His eyes harden. The machine doesn’t click into place so much as force itself inside him. The sound design leans into the wet, ugly thud of metal binding to flesh. It plays less like empowerment than invasion, a brutal compromise mistaken for salvation.



Whether you can roll with the film’s structural wobble depends on how much patience you have for sincere B-movies. The pacing is jumpy, and the subplot about a genetically modified pop star (Aggy K. Adams) feels like it got dropped in from a flashier, shallower movie.

But I don’t think perfection is the only standard that matters. *Altered* gets clumsy whenever it tries to speak in giant letters about genetic inequality. It gets interesting when it stays close to the body. Underneath the sci-fi plating and the occasionally rough dubbing, there’s a simple, beating idea about how much pain people will absorb for the ones they love. It’s messy. It bruises easily. That’s part of why it feels alive.