Alisa Dudareva
Overview
Three friends, Naika, Zhenya, and Alisa, embark on a traditional spa weekend to escape their routine and family roles, but especially their mothers-in-law. Their plans are ruined when Naika's future mother-in-law, Margarita Pavlovna, unexpectedly joins them, and the three friends' escape from reality and everyday life turns into a true test of their friendship. It turns out they all view life differently.
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Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
The Mud Bath of Our Discontent
I've watched enough "women behaving badly on vacation" comedies to spot the machinery almost immediately: frantic packing, suspiciously perfect resort, too much tequila, somebody face-first in decorative water. Vladislav Bogush’s *Между нами, девочками* (Between Us Girls) hits some of those marks, sure, but it keeps sidestepping pure slapstick in favor of something more interesting. What lingers is not chaos. It’s fatigue—the jagged, mean kind that comes from people who have been holding it together for too long.
Bogush’s smartest move may be the casting. Alisa Dudareva, Naika Kazieva, and Margarita Rodina are actual stand-up comedians, and you can feel it in how they handle dialogue. They don’t politely deliver lines; they gnaw at them. Their banter has that defensive rhythm comedians develop when silence starts to feel dangerous. Naika, Zhenya, and Alisa head to a spa hoping to get away from home, obligation, and a chorus of meddling mothers-in-law, and the movie never bothers pretending they’ve arrived as glamorous heroines. Bogush keeps the dark circles under their eyes, the sag in their backs, and the visible drop in their bodies the second the hotel-room door clicks shut. These are women who don’t want adventure. They want unconsciousness.
Of course, the screenplay refuses to let them have it. The minute Naika’s future mother-in-law, Margarita Pavlovna, shows up, the whole weekend stops feeling like a getaway and starts feeling like a siege.
That entrance is where the film really wakes up. Suddenly it’s not a resort comedy so much as a generational standoff, all armor and old resentments. Tatyana Dogileva, a veteran of Russian cinema who has lately been using matriarch roles to terrific effect—she was easily one of the strongest presences in *Vampires of the Midland*—walks in and changes the air pressure. She barely has to speak. In the mud-bath scene, the younger women keep squirming, complaining, shifting around in the sludge. Dogileva plants herself and goes still, as if the mud were just another layer of protection she’s learned to wear. Her jaw locks. Her chin dips by a fraction. That’s enough. The whole scene cools down around her. (I’ll admit the movie loses a little steam once these dynamics settle in. There’s a stretch in the middle—close to twenty minutes—where it leans too hard on basic misunderstanding gags and starts spinning in place.)
Then Bogush does the right thing and quiets everyone down. Near the end, the four women sit outside at dusk in thick white robes, passing around cheap wine. The lighting is flat and a little unforgiving. Nobody is trying to be funny anymore. Naika finally lets the sarcasm drop, and Margarita exhales like she’s emptying out decades of compromise in one breath. The realization hits them all at once: they aren't really each other’s enemy. They’ve just been crushed by the same set of expectations at different stages of life. *Между нами, девочками* doesn’t pretend one weekend can repair all of that. It settles for something smaller and truer—a few minutes of honesty, and room to breathe.
I've watched enough "women behaving badly on vacation" comedies to spot the machinery almost immediately: frantic packing, suspiciously perfect resort, too much tequila, somebody face-first in decorative water. Vladislav Bogush’s *Между нами, девочками* (Between Us Girls) hits some of those marks, sure, but it keeps sidestepping pure slapstick in favor of something more interesting. What lingers is not chaos. It’s fatigue—the jagged, mean kind that comes from people who have been holding it together for too long.
Bogush’s smartest move may be the casting. Alisa Dudareva, Naika Kazieva, and Margarita Rodina are actual stand-up comedians, and you can feel it in how they handle dialogue. They don’t politely deliver lines; they gnaw at them. Their banter has that defensive rhythm comedians develop when silence starts to feel dangerous. Naika, Zhenya, and Alisa head to a spa hoping to get away from home, obligation, and a chorus of meddling mothers-in-law, and the movie never bothers pretending they’ve arrived as glamorous heroines. Bogush keeps the dark circles under their eyes, the sag in their backs, and the visible drop in their bodies the second the hotel-room door clicks shut. These are women who don’t want adventure. They want unconsciousness.
Of course, the screenplay refuses to let them have it. The minute Naika’s future mother-in-law, Margarita Pavlovna, shows up, the whole weekend stops feeling like a getaway and starts feeling like a siege.
That entrance is where the film really wakes up. Suddenly it’s not a resort comedy so much as a generational standoff, all armor and old resentments. Tatyana Dogileva, a veteran of Russian cinema who has lately been using matriarch roles to terrific effect—she was easily one of the strongest presences in *Vampires of the Midland*—walks in and changes the air pressure. She barely has to speak. In the mud-bath scene, the younger women keep squirming, complaining, shifting around in the sludge. Dogileva plants herself and goes still, as if the mud were just another layer of protection she’s learned to wear. Her jaw locks. Her chin dips by a fraction. That’s enough. The whole scene cools down around her. (I’ll admit the movie loses a little steam once these dynamics settle in. There’s a stretch in the middle—close to twenty minutes—where it leans too hard on basic misunderstanding gags and starts spinning in place.)
Then Bogush does the right thing and quiets everyone down. Near the end, the four women sit outside at dusk in thick white robes, passing around cheap wine. The lighting is flat and a little unforgiving. Nobody is trying to be funny anymore. Naika finally lets the sarcasm drop, and Margarita exhales like she’s emptying out decades of compromise in one breath. The realization hits them all at once: they aren't really each other’s enemy. They’ve just been crushed by the same set of expectations at different stages of life. *Между нами, девочками* doesn’t pretend one weekend can repair all of that. It settles for something smaller and truer—a few minutes of honesty, and room to breathe.