‘Vladimir’ Review: Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall in Sharp Netflix Drama

Near the end of Netflix’s Vladimir, the lead, played by Rachel Weisz, has an epiphany about the not-quite-love triangle she’s found herself in. Her much younger colleague Vlad (Leo Woodall), she realizes, has been telling himself one thing about their mixed-signals flirtation. Her philandering husband, John (John Slattery), has been telling himself another. Both have only viewed her as a supporting player in their narratives, which they presume will unfold according to their plans.

But, she warns, “there are forces beyond their control,” chief among them our unnamed protagonist herself. An antiheroine as sharply funny as she is willfully blinkered and as oddly compelling as she is repellent, she has a voice that defines Julia May Jonas’ adaptation of her own novel — elevating it into something knottier than the feminist cancel-culture treatise might appear at first glance, and all the more insightful for it.

The backdrop to her sexual obsession is a situation that, amid cancel-culture campus dramas like Netflix’s The Chair and Tár and After the Hunt, ought to feel very familiar indeed. At a tony liberal arts institution, John, previously head of the English department, stands accused of sleeping with his students. The women, most of them several years past graduation now, say his behavior was an abuse of power. He insists they were all consenting adults — even his wife had agreed to an open marriage — and that therefore, he’s done nothing wrong.

In theory, our protagonist, a professor of creative writing, is standing by her man. She avoids talking about the situation when she can, and offers that “it was a different time” when she can’t. If anything, she declares in an overly mannered, fourth-wall-breaking narration that’s more effective the more sparingly it’s used, it offends her feminist sensibility that these coeds are ceding their own sexual agency over affairs they chose to have. Not that she’s eager to say as much to her students, who’d prefer to see John ousted and her stop doing “the whole supportive wife thing.”

But as John’s disciplinary hearing looms, she finds herself struck as if by lighting with an all-consuming crush on Vlad, the hotshot author who’s just been hired to teach at the college along with his more reclusive wife, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick). Over six weeks, or eight half-hour chapters, what begins as a girlish infatuation rapidly metastasizes into the dark tableau that opens the Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini-directed premiere: that of Vlad tied unconscious to a chair, while his would-be lover complains to us in the foreground about her own powerlessness as a woman in her 50s.

Weisz is well-suited to a role that draws on her gift for slipperiness, as seen in (among other things) her devious dual performance in Amazon’s Dead Ringers. While Vladimir goes out of its way to make her character look polished and pretty on the outside, draping her in deep reds and rich purples that bring out the coquettish flush of her cheek, it does no such favors to her inner self, which it reveals to be callous, judgmental, selfish and self-deluded. A recurring habit of hers is to insist, as if hurt by the very suggestion, that she “would never do” this or that terrible thing, just as the show mounts evidence that she has in fact done exactly that.

That she also happens to be quite witty, dropping sardonic lines like, “As George Bernard Shaw once said, a firm ass is wasted on the young,” makes her more entertaining than aggravating to be around, but only just. Vladimir is less invested in moral calculation than psychological dissection, and thus has no particular interest in scolding her. But it sugarcoats none of her transgressions as she resorts to desperate measures to draw Vlad nearer or to save John’s neck. It clocks every lie she tells herself about her motives or her history with a pointedly raised brow.

And it spares her no embarrassment as she falls deeper and deeper into obsession. She’ll neglect her unhappy adult daughter (Ellen Robertson’s Sid), bail in John’s hour of need, flake on her own professional duties. But she’ll never run out of attention to lavish on every tiny nuance of Vlad’s body (the curve of his thigh under the hem of his shorts, the texture of his neck where it disappears under a shirt collar), or energy to scrutinize every friendly professional interaction for signs of his interest. She disappears into her own graphic daydreams of him for moments that turn into hours that she eventually turns, with the ferocity of a woman possessed, into the first draft of her long-awaited second novel.

To her, Vlad is an escape, a mirror, a time machine, a muse, though she prefers to think of him as, simply, “my love.” What she is not especially interested in is seeing him as is his own person, with wants or needs or an identity that extend beyond her own. Woodall, who between One Day and The White Lotus is carving out quite a niche for himself playing problematic objects of desire, emphasizes this point by leaning into Vlad’s casual inscrutability. Even as the actor highlights his golden-boy handsomeness for the camera, the character comes across as if he’s never imagined he might be the one watched rather than the one watching. 

The purposely insular point of view can make Vladimir a challenging watch. There’s no escaping the lead’s head space as she grows increasingly unmoored. We’re only ever allowed to understand Vlad or Cynthia or even John to the extent that she allows herself to, which isn’t much; to the end, it’s difficult to ascertain their true motives. And while the show’s lack of softness or sweetness makes sense, coming as it does from the perspective of a woman who’s short on both at the moment, the perpetually arch tone blunts nearly every emotion but unhinged lust.

But it also makes the series distinctive, all the way up through the appropriately wicked, if rather abrupt, end. Jonas’ book concluded with a final blow I found to be incendiary but also oddly anticlimactic. Her miniseries goes in a radically different direction, but can’t shake the sense that it’s simply run out of places to go. For my money, though, the latter better preserves the story’s ultimate conception of desire not as a connection between two people, but as a mechanism for playing out one’s relationship with oneself: The story ends when the protagonist’s use for Vladimir does.

It’s not flattering and it’s certainly not nice, but it feels honest and maybe even — oh, let’s just admit it — relatable. Dig into the heart of your deepest desire, Vladimir argues, and you’ll find nothing more or less than your own face staring right back at you.