*Warning - contains spoilers for all eight episodes of Vladimir.*
At the end of last year, I spoke with the writer Dennis Kelly, known for his series such as Utopia and Pulling. He was promoting his phenomenal BBC drama, Waiting for the Out, when he made the following comment:
"My bugbear at the moment is that we are currently mistaking adrenaline for drama. We currently think that adrenaline and drama are the same thing and they f**king are not.
"The amount of times you see one of these Netflix-type things – look, I've done this as well, so I'm not slagging it off too much – but someone wakes up and they're in a crime scene or something, and then you flash back, and it's like, what you're saying to the audience is, 'This is boring, right? But don't worry, you're going to see someone die.' You just think, 'F**king hell, that's so lame.'"
It's important to note, Kelly wasn't speaking about any one drama or Netflix series in particular. He certainly wasn't speaking about Vladimir, which wouldn't be released for a number of months after we spoke. However, to my mind, he may as well have been.
Vladimir, starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall, is a new Netflix erotic thriller based on the novel of the same name, which kicks off with a fascinating sequence.
Weisz's character, an unnamed professor, speaks with the audience throughout, and that aspect of the series is present from the off. In the first scene, Weisz's character is seen writing in a cabin. She reveals to us that her students find her out of touch, her daughter finds her "entire personhood useless", and that she worries she "may not be the cause of a spontaneous erection ever again".
She then walks through the cabin and we see that sat there, tied to a chair, is Woodall's title character, Vladimir. This is where we first meet him – unconscious, with chains around his waist and his trousers off. Weisz walks out of the cabin as Vladimir wakes and reacts in horror to his situation.
"What the f**k?!", he yells in terror as the title card comes up. We then flash back for the rest of the series, to the point at which Weisz's character meets Vladimir, and the story progresses.
Throughout the series, we watch as Weisz's professor becomes more and more enamoured – even obsessed – with Vladimir, as she also reckons with her husband John's misdemeanours. A fellow professor, he has been sleeping with his students, in a situation the entire campus is horrified by, but which she thinks is overblown, understanding them to all have been consensual encounters.
Throughout, I found my own opinion of the series shifting – at first, it seemed as though the series wasn't wrestling with its knotty subject matter intently enough, but these conversations did emerge in later episodes.
The encounters between Weisz's character and Vladimir were excruciating, but often in a genuinely funny way. The performances were largely impressive, particularly from Weisz, who in many ways carried the series on her back.
The bits to camera, and moments at which we found we were watching the character's fantasies rather than reality, felt overused and then underused. At one point, I began to wonder whether a more substantial rug-pull was on the way, and we would find out Vladimir's interest in the central character was imagined, but this never materialised.
I was conflicted, but all the while waiting to see how – and crucially, why – we would get to the state we found the characters in at the start, with Weisz's character having seemingly tied up an unconscious Vladimir.
No matter how intense the character's obsession got with her co-worker, it still felt like a stretch to have the character go so far off the deep end that she would kidnap and abuse him.
Then, at the end of episode 7, the moment came. As the pair drank together at her cabin, while John was at his disciplinary hearing, Weisz's character told us that she didn't want Vladimir to go.
To keep him there, as she plied him with more alcohol, she also drugged his drink. Once he was knocked out, she sent a text from his phone to his wife, Cynthia, telling her that he knew she was having an affair with John (she wasn't, but that's a whole other issue) and not to contact him.
She also chained him to a chair, zip-tied one of his arms to it and sat on the floor, stroking his legs. He had no trousers on because he had been in the swimming pool. She then lay on the sofa with a book and waited for him to wake. He did so at the end of the episode, confused, disorientated and horrified.
It was set up for a final episode where all bets were off. I genuinely had no idea where things were going or how this would be resolved.
In the end, it turns out, I shouldn't have bothered wondering – the series had no interest in exploring this ridiculous heightening of the stakes in any meaningful way. Immediately in episode 8, the air was let out of the tyre.
Within the first two minutes of the episode, Weisz's character 'explained' that they had been drunk, he had said he wanted to be dominated, she passed out and the whole thing was just a "huge misunderstanding". She then untied him and confirmed they hadn't had sex.
The episode then pivoted to exploring the repercussions of the text she sent to Cynthia, and of subsequently telling Vladimir about the affair between her and John. Notably, this was the only bit of information that was not teed up for us about that sequence in the opening episode.
From there on, the underwhelming finale played out, but in many ways, no matter how engrossing it might have been, I would still have been left with a sour taste in my mouth.
The opening episode set something crucial up with its fast-forward. Some may think it's clever and thematically resonant for Weisz's character to have teased us in this way with something that would ultimately be inconsequential, but for a viewer it's maddening.
Why establish something so dramatically at odds with where the series started, and an intense raising of the stakes, only to immediately have it hand-waved away within two minutes of the event occurring.
It feels like a cheat, like Netflix and the team behind the show wanted to suggest, as Kelly said, that something more exciting was coming down the track. At least in some of the circumstances Kelly was referencing that promise is delivered on.
Here, it actively wasn't. Viewers waiting a full eight episodes to find out how that moment would play out, why Weisz was doing what she was doing, what she was planning and how Vladimir would react to it, only for it to be deemed inconsequential, just a silly moment which was easily breezed past.
Really, there were two options here. If the series was never going to get to the sort of stakes suggested by chains and zipties, then don't introduce them. To do otherwise is to lie to your audience.
Alternatively, if it is, then grapple with that fact and deal with the repercussions properly. Take viewers to a darker place, where Weisz's character truly does go off the deep end and becomes dangerous in the process.
By treading some middle road, where you get all the shock and awe of the moment in a neat visual to sell up top, but can't be bothered to deal with the aftermath, the series cheapens itself and makes the viewer feel betrayed in the process.
Vladimir isn't the first show to do this – as Kelly said ahead of time, it's a trope you can see in plenty of other shows. It also shouldn't be judged solely on one mistake. There are certainly elements and sequences to enjoy here, with a knotty, intriguing exploration of morality and sexual politics at its centre, and an A-grade performance from Weisz.
However, the mistake itself is so brazen, so blatant in its attempt to sell something it never intended to provide, that it does feel fairly unforgivable, and one future series should pay heed to avoid.
Vladimir is available to stream on Netflix now. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media.
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