What Netflix's "Vladimir" Gets Right About The Female Psyche!

Netflix's dark comedy series "Vladimir", based on the best-selling novel by Julia May Scott, follows a beloved English professor, M (Rachel Weisz), whose life is upended when her husband, also a professor, is placed on leave for having affairs with his students. Despite this, she remains loyal to him within the boundaries of their open marriage. Her emotional stability begins to fracture, however, when she becomes fixated on the new, younger professor Vladimir (Leo Woodall), a fascination that borders on obsession.

The series feels strikingly original in its portrayal of desire. It is at once humorous, unsettling, and deeply visceral. In recent years, erotica has resurged across film and television, from "Bridgerton" to Babygirl and Wuthering Heights, but these narratives often aestheticize desire, rendering it polished and, at times, sterile. "Vladimir", by contrast, strips desire of its glamour. Instead, it lingers on its irrationality and capacity to destabilize.  

Much of the show’s dark humor emerges from the protagonist’s spiraling fixation. Her inner monologue, delivered through frequent fourth-wall breaks, lays bare fantasies and intrusive thoughts she cannot contain. At one point, mid-conversation, she turns to the camera and declares, "I have always felt anger comes from the vagina; the fact that isn’t explored in literature has always frustrated me." The line is jarring, almost absurd. She offers no explanation, leaving it for the audience to grapple with. The remark gestures toward the limited, often sanitized ways female anger is represented. Here, it is made into something palatable or symbolic but expressed bluntly, even awkwardly. This unfiltered openness makes M oddly endearing and is precisely what gives the show its sense of freshness. 

In a later scene, while M teaches Rebecca, her students dismiss the novel as sexist and outdated. M counters that they are overlooking the text’s enduring insight into obsession and the uncomfortable, often humiliating fixation on a lover’s past. Who hasn’t compared themselves to a partner’s ex, imagined the intimacy they shared, or measured their own worth against it? It is a feeling most people recognize but are reluctant to admit. In defending Rebecca, M is not only making a case for the novel’s relevance but inadvertently revealing her own obsession and impending unraveling.

What makes "Vladimir" so compelling is its refusal to either condemn or romanticize its protagonist. Instead, it presents her as she is: a woman in her 40s, intellectually sharp yet emotionally unstable, caught in the monotony of a small-town academic life and an unremarkable marriage. There is nothing overtly extraordinary about her, and that is precisely the point. She becomes a mirror for the less palatable aspects of desire, envy, obsession, and insecurity that are rarely depicted because they are neither socially acceptable nor conventionally "cool". Unlike that of figures such as Amy Dunne, her unraveling is not stylized as seductive or powerful. For all these reasons, "Vladimir" is unlike any show we have seen before. It is messy, odd, deeply human, and terribly fun. 

"Vladimir" is now streaming on Netflix!