Azamat (Ayan Utepbergen) is down on his luck. He owes money everywhere, resulting in a painful beating, and has just crashed his ride-share car. Adding to the mounting pressure is the badly timed news that his wife, Tancho (Dilnaz Kurmangali), is expecting. Desperate and angry, he takes his last fake dollar bill to blag a single cigarette from a local convenience store clerk. When she refuses, he crashes out, stealing the fag and the children’s spinal cancer donation box from the counter.

On returning home, he meets his angry mother looking for her slice of the debt pie. Panicked and pissed off, Azmat gives birth to a diabolical lie that will swing a morally contemptible wrecking ball into all around him. He tells her that his wife has spinal cancer.

This evil deception spreads like the very disease the couple are appropriating, as stage 3 cancer becomes “staged” 4, they obtain false documentation, callously observe the afflicted for inspiration and shave their heads for realist brownie points. However low they sink into cold-hearted chicanery, nothing can prepare them for the coming fallout from their fucked up fraudulence.

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Aitore Zholdaskali’s brutal attack on end-stage capitalism, screened at Fantasia 2026, will test the limits of many viewers, both ethically and empathetically. However, it is beautifully crafted and stunningly acted with a strong sense of identity that keeps it above the Plimsoll line of exploitative waters. Just. The general vibe is one of Tarantino does Parasite, but it’s less flamboyantly verbose than the work of the former and more thematically vulgar than the latter. Indeed, although Sicko shares the same poverty-stricken DNA as Parasite, it is about those on the financial margins of society devouring each other to survive rather than leeching off the rich.

Of course, the core premise of faking cancer for cash is taboo for a reason. Yet, the film’s acerbic nature packs in enough satire to temper the uncomfortable moral curvature of the film’s narrative spine. Social media crocodile tears, self-serving corporate fundraising, male toxicity, and institutional corruption all lie bleeding under its uncompromising cosh.

Viewers should come prepared. The final third of the film shifts tonal gears and power slides gleefully onto the blood-slicked skid pan of extreme cinema. This outrageous endgame evokes the same misery and pain as the most numbing work of Gasper Noé, Lars von Trier, and Katrin Gebbe. Although all the cast excel, Dilnaz Kurmangali is nothing short of astonishing as the wife who cries cancer. Her range and control are next level, conjuring up unlikely sympathy as she walks effortlessly across the smouldering embers of moral bankruptcy.

This controversial opening of bile ducts is not going to be for everyone. However, if you allow it to invade the safe spaces of your sensibilities, it will snap closed like a steel bear trap, biting down until the last flicker of human decency is snuffed from the screen.

★★★★☆

North American Premiere at Fantasia Film Festival on the 27th of July 2026 / Dilnaz Kurmangali, Aida Kurmangaliyeva, Ayan Utepbergen, Azat Zhumadil / Dir: Aitore Zholdaskali / Loco Films