Amphibian Man

Amphibian Man (1962) is a Soviet science fiction film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Gennady Kazansky and Vladimir Chebotaryov. When a gravely ill boy came to Dr. Salvator, the surgeon saved him by transplanting shark gills — turning him into something the local fishermen would later call "the sea devil." Ichtiander grew up in the ocean and barely knows dry land.

Vladimir Korenev plays Ichtiander opposite Anastasia Vertinskaya as Gutierrez, a pearl diver's daughter. Their meeting sets off a rivalry with merchant Pedro Zurita, played with cold menace by Mikhail Kozakov, who wants to exploit the amphibian boy as an underwater labourer. The film adapts Alexander Belyaev's 1928 science fiction novel; the underwater photography, shot off the Crimean coast, was unlike anything Soviet audiences had seen before and drew millions to cinemas when the film opened.

At its core this is a story about belonging nowhere — Ichtiander is too strange for the surface and too human for the deep. Stream Amphibian Man (1962) online on iFILM.