Vladimir

The Humiliation of Being Seen

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over an English department office. It sounds like paper-thin egos brushing past one another, the air clogged with unread journals and the faint desperation of people who have spent their lives needing to be the smartest person in the room. In Julia May Jonas’s adaptation of her own novel, *Vladimir*, that silence does most of the damage.

Watching Rachel Weisz move through it, you feel like she’s playing a woman who’s losing her ability to keep lying to herself. She’s a literature professor with a marriage that has gone still and stale, and a professional life shaped by unstable sociopolitical tensions. When she becomes obsessed with a younger colleague, the show doesn’t frame it as a juicy affair. It plays more like a gradual psychological unspooling. There’s barely any romance in it, really, only the frantic projection of someone desperate to feel relevant again.



Weisz is exceptionally good at this kind of brittle self-possession. She holds herself with rigid propriety, all posture and control, while her eyes flick around like something cornered. That physical tension is what keeps the show alive; she isn’t just delivering lines, she’s living inside the warped geometry of a mid-life crisis. Leo Woodall meets her well, making Vladimir feel less like a fully knowable person than a surface she can project onto. He’s charming, obviously, but also unreadable in a way that turns every scene into a question: *Is he actually manipulating her, or is she inventing the whole thing to suit her needs?*

That uncertainty is where the show gets sharp. It never gives you an easy villain. There’s a faculty dinner in the fourth episode that collapses into a circular fight about morality, and it’s so exact in its observation that it becomes hard to watch. Everyone is performing correctness, trying to sound most evolved, most principled, while being completely governed by smaller, uglier desires. As *The Guardian* put it in a review, the show "transforms the campus novel into a jagged, high-stakes game of emotional chess where the board is perpetually on fire."



Jonas’s direction leans hard into the chill of the setting. The palette stays muted, full of sterile blues and those bruised late-afternoon academic purples. This is not a series interested in making its characters likable. If anything, it pushes you to see how much empathy you can extend before you recoil. I kept wincing every time the protagonist reached for something profound and instead exposed a naked need for validation. It’s a tricky balance, asking us to sit with someone this unpleasant without tipping over into contempt, and mostly the show manages it.

Still, I’m not convinced the last two episodes quite hold. They edge toward a thriller plot that feels attached to, rather than grown from, the far more compelling character study in the first six hours. The series is best when it’s just people talking in rooms and getting each other disastrously wrong. Once the machinery of plot kicks in, some of that intimate, gnawing anxiety gets drowned out by bigger, more artificial stakes.



Even with that drift, *Vladimir* lingers. It’s a cold, unnerving look at the lies people build a life around. By the end, it’s clear the obsession was never really about the younger man; it was about the panic of being seen as you are: aging, flawed, needy, exposed. Whether that lands for you probably depends on how much patience you have for characters who refuse to improve, but I found the honesty of it hard to shake. This is a show about the humiliation of being human, and it doesn’t look away.