‘Vladimir’ series review: Rachel Weisz steams up the screen

Vladimir, based on Julia May Jonas’s novel of the same name is stupendous, sexy and smart. Set in the rarefied world of academia, and further still in the highbrow, navel-gazing fishbowl of an English Literature department, the mini-series follows the protagonist M (an incandescent Rachel Weisz) through a turbulent time in her life.

Once a beloved, golden couple on campus with M’s creative writing courses being the hot ticket, and her husband, John, (John Slattery) the chair of the English Department being feted by all as a brilliant poet, now find their lives coming apart at the seams. M has to deal with increasing feelings of being obsolete and a crippling writer’s block while John is suspended after his students accuse him of having sex with them.

Into this heightened cauldron of emotions, walks in the devastatingly handsome, Vladimir (Leo Woodall), the newly hired assistant professor for the English department. Vladimir is a hotshot writer with one successful book under his belt. M is instantly smitten and soon finds herself fantasising about him at inopportune moments.

Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), also a writer, has been hired as adjunct professor and M finds to her dismay that her students are gravitating towards her class. Meanwhile Sid (Ellen Robertson), M’s 27-year-old daughter and an attorney, is shocked by the allegations against John and insists on helping. She faces troubles of her own, including a fraught relationship with a girlfriend who wants children, and the loss of her job.

M finds her life coming unravelled as she is increasingly obsessed with Vladimir even as her family constantly calls and messages her. Vladimir wears its love for literature lightly as quotes from T.S. Eliot and DH Lawrence (“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically”) float organically.

There is also the name Vladimir, reminding us of Vladimir Nabokov and Lolita with the tables being turned and the man being the object of desire.  

A still from ‘Vladimir’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

By not giving the protagonist a name, Jonas, who has also adapted her novel for screen, has tapped into the long line of Gothic novels with nameless protagonists including Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which is discussed in M’s class along with Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.

M’s take on Eliot’s line from The Hollow Men, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but an Np” is clever and amusing. Department politics also come alive, with shrill Flo (Miriam Silverman) and wishy-washy David (Matt Walsh), the interim head with whom M once had an affair.

The show is powered by a luminescent Weisz, who is brutally honest, even while being the most unreliable narrator of them all. Was her salad a hit as she says? And more important, did she call 911? Her behaviour gets increasingly erratic as the series progresses, but if this be madness, there sure is method in it.

Her reaction to John’s philandering (they have an open marriage) while not the most comfortable, is honest for her character. The series also shows the imbalance of power in the affairs, even if consensual, and exquisitely captured in Sid’s expression as each of the young women talk of their affairs with John. Lila (Kayli Carter) M’s former student who had an affair with John and has her life fall apart, is a case in point.

Apart from M’s constant breaking of the fourth wall, which is annoying, Vladimir puts power, gender, desire and agency under a sexy lens to create a smooth, bingeable miniseries, in pocket-sized, power-packed episodes. Half-hour episodes are such a relief after the hour-long meanderings on the meaning of life that some shows punish us with.

Vladimir is currently streaming on Netflix

Published – March 09, 2026 06:44 pm IST