A love story, Vladimir is not. That much becomes clear fairly early in the eight-episode limited series. If, like us, you’ve already binged your way through Netflix’s daring, psychosexual academic thriller, you probably have a few questions. Namely, what exactly happened in that ending?
Maybe you expected the story to conclude when Rachel Weisz’s unnamed protagonist, who spends most of the series lusting for Leo Woodall’s smirking Vladimir, after those satisfying sexy times in the cabin. But things didn’t wrap up neatly with that affair—and perhaps that’s the point. After all, this show, and Julia May Jonas’s book upon which it is based, is all about dark, unrequited desires and power dynamics as told by an unreliable narrator who largely lives inside her own imaginative head. It has a lot more in common with the Gothic romantic literature like Jane Eyre than a fun, sexy TV romp.
Indeed, the show is filled with literary references to novels about dangerous obsessions that can help us understand the show’s ending. There’s Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Weisz’s character teaches to her students, about another unnamed narrator who develops an all-consuming obsession with her mysterious older husband’s dead wife, Rebecca. There’s also the aforementioned Charlotte Brontë novel, Jane Eyre, another story about a mousy protagonist whose relationship with gruff older Mr. Rochester is literally haunted by (spoiler) his “mad” secret wife who he keeps in the attic. And then there’s Vladimir (yes, Vladimir) Nabokov’s Lolita, which sees an unnamed narrator lusting after a child. But more on all of this later.
First of all, what happened in that Vladimir finale? And what does it mean?
A trip to the cabin
After months of sexual fantasies about Vlad, Weisz’s character finally takes some action. She invites Vlad for lunch and ends up convincing him to come with her to her secluded cabin in the woods. For an afternoon writing retreat, she says. Sure. While we might have all hoped this would go the Heated Rivalry cottage route, it quickly became a lot more Cabin in the Woods.
Before long, the protagonist has slipped a little muscle relaxer into Vlad’s whisky. When the half-conscious Vlad tries to stumble away, our protagonist takes her chance and chains him up to an old wooden chair before calmly returning to her manuscript—which, by the way, is basically fan fiction of her Vlad-inspired fantasies.
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A happy ending?
But it’s twist upon twist in Vladimir, and when Vlad comes to, he confesses that, actually, he’s not not into this whole getting-chained-up thing. In fact, his manuscript is also about his fantasies—in this case, fantasies about a young man who has a meaningful, intellectual, tender affair with his older mentor. How sweet.