Vladimir Almost Had a Very Different Finale. Here’s Why It Ended in Flames.

Spoilers below.

Well, at least we now know how Vladimir (Leo Woodall) wound up pants-less and chained to a chair.

The final episode of eponymous Netflix limited series Vladimir, titled “Against Interpretation,” turns the show’s persistent sexual edging into one looming question: What if Stephen King’s horror story Misery was…actually a romance? The subversive dark comedy series—based on playwright Julia May Jonas’ 2022 debut novel of the same name—references (and re-contextualizes) classic novels such as the aforementioned Misery, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and, of course, the titular nod to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, in order to challenge modern understandings of sex, power, and gender. The literary allusions in Vladimir are also intentionally tongue-in-cheek: The entire eight episodes take place in the world of a liberal arts college literature department, one that has enough drama to seem stranger than fiction. And this finale only further proves it.

Our nameless protagonist (Rachel Weisz) is an author and professor who has been combating writers’s block for the last two decades—nearly as long as her new colleague Vladimir (Woodall) has been alive. Weisz’s character discovers newfound relevancy and desire in her obsession with the married adjunct teacher; the fantasy of consummating her crush leads to her getting stoned, masturbating, and writing out the details of an imagined affair on dozens of yellow legal pads, which constitute the first draft of her new novel. Dreaming of steamy encounters with Vlad also serves as an outlet through which our protagonist can confront the chaos that her husband, fellow professor John (John Slattery), has caused in the wake of his numerous affairs with undergrads.

Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall in Vladimir.

The protagonist’s obsession with Vladimir becomes a literal escape, too, after Weisz’s character chooses to seduce him on the same day that John must attend his academic board ethics hearing. Instead of going to the hearing with John and their daughter, Sidney (Ellen Robertston), the professor opts to treat Vladimir to a boozy lunch at a remote Italian restaurant that just so happens to be en route to her secluded writing cabin. After encouraging Vladimir to take the afternoon for himself—so he needn’t have to worry about how his wife Cynthia (Jessica Henwick) is coping with her postpartum depression (yay feminism!)—Weisz’s character convinces Vladimir to visit the cabin.

Yet this cottage trip is more of a Misery-esque prison than a Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton love nest: A drunk Vladimir accepts a glass of whiskey from Weisz’s frisky professor without realizing that she’s slipped him a muscle relaxer. But, soon enough, he realizes he’s trapped in the wilderness with his unhinged colleague. In a state of desperation, Weisz’s character drugs the nearly unconscious Vladimir, chains him to an antique chair, and works on her manuscript while watching him sleep. Her kidnapping of Vladimir leads to the first twist of the finale: Shockingly, Vladimir digs Weisz’s character’s deluded desire. Vladimir is sexually into it, even if just for the plot—a.k.a. literal fodder for his own book draft. (While Weisz’s character is penning a novel about reclaiming pleasure with a younger man as a 50-something intellectual, Vladimir’s book is billed as a story from the perspective of a protege who has a passionate, tender romance with his mentor. How very autofictional!) Weisz’s character acting impulsively and kidnapping Vladimir only further emphasizes his literary version of a student-teacher fantasy.

And then John arrives, and he brings with him the reminder of reality. After not having heard from his wife for days (she was busy finally consummating her affair with Vlad), John is concerned about Weisz’s character and drives out to the cabin to tell her that he was acquitted of all alleged wrongdoing on campus. He’s not surprised to find Vladimir in his bedroom; John even congratulates Weisz for leaning into their open-marriage agreement! It’s only when Weisz’s character is caught in the lie that she has “proof” of John sleeping with Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia, that things go haywire. As it turns out, John and Cynthia were only doing drugs and writing together, not having sex—but the drug abuse enrages Vladimir more than any alleged infidelity, as new mom Cynthia is a recovering addict. Vladimir punches John in a very Aidan-and-Big–in-Suffern (see: Sex and the City season 4, episode 10) moment, but then all is resolved: These are writers after all! They crave a conclusion!

Vladimir goes to sleep in the guest room and plans on leaving the next morning. John and Weisz’s character briefly chat in the kitchen about what the trial result means for his pension. (Of course, he gets to keep it, despite the assault allegations.)

It’s only after these plotlines wrap up that the finale goes off-book, literally.

John Slattery and Rachel Weisz in Vladimir.

Weisz’s character awakens to the cabin on fire. As both Vladimir and John try to leave through the back door—which is closer to the bedrooms but also notorious for getting jammed—the professor spots her legal pads, a.k.a. the full draft of her novel, sitting amongst the flames in the living room. Both men look to her for help, yet in that moment, our protagonist chooses herself and her career: She leaps over the fire to save her manuscript instead, leaving Vladimir and John trapped inside.

In the aftermath, Weisz’s character stands outside the cabin, not attempting to help her husband or her lover pry open the door. Nor do we see her call 911. As she does throughout the series, Weisz turns to the camera and directly informs viewers that everyone survived. According to her, Vladimir even publishes his book, which Weisz’s character inspired. She assures the audience that everyone lives happily ever after. And then she winks and says “or maybe not.”

Is Weisz’s character a killer? Did the fire actually even happen, or was that just the easiest way for Weisz’s character’s book to end on a meta note? We already knew that du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca was top of mind for Weisz’s character, since it was the subject of her final class before heading to the cabin. The 1938 book similarly centers on an unnamed protagonist who marries a wealthy older widower and becomes obsessed with the ghost of his deceased—and possibly murdered—wife, Rebecca, while living in their secluded estate, Manderley, which erupts in flames at the story’s end. Did Vladimir’s protagonist’s writing retreat become the modern version of Manderley? Dare we even wonder if she set the fire herself?

This flame-filled finale was ultimately necessary for the Netflix adaptation, despite its differences from Jonas’s book. In an email interview, production designer Sharon Lomofsky told ELLE that the original finale script had a “couple versions” of the finale’s last scene, but that the ending was “always meant to involve the cabin burning down.” Lomofsky added that she “had heard at some point that Netflix might change” it, though, she added, “I am pleased they didn’t.” (ELLE has reached out to Netflix for comment.)

In Jonas’s novel, Vladimir actually saves both John and Weisz’s character from the fire. The married couple are physically scarred from the accident and are forced to retreat into the shadows amidst their academic falls from grace. In a separate interview with ELLE, Jonas herself added that “the ending that existed in the book is almost like an epilogue, really. It felt like that was not going to work inside of the [Netflix] series. It didn’t. We talked a lot about…What can she take from this? Desire gave her [something] bigger than any of the actual events that happened.”

Rachel Weisz in Vladimir.

Perhaps the Netflix adaptation’s revised ending, four years after the book was released, speaks to the current culture more. Lead actress and executive producer Weisz said in an interview with Netflix’s Tudum that the breaking of the fourth wall is paramount to understanding her character’s dedication to living out her own twisted fairytale with Vladimir…violence and all. “You have direct access to what the character is thinking, and then also what she wants you to think,” Weisz said. “What she wants you to think is a little distant from the total truth. The protagonist is reliable in the sense that she wants to control her narrative. The narrative she tells isn’t always accurate—but that seems like a very human trait, to adjust the truth for one’s audience when things are going out of control…Her fantasy is about the power of desire—the invigorating, stimulating, inspiring, and revivifying feeling that she gets from her obsession with Vlad. What it’s about is coming back to life in a certain way [after lying] dormant for some time.”

It is only fitting, then, for the character to make a literal decision between life and death in the end: Does she escape the fire alone, her next career milestone in hand? Or does she remain alongside these two men in a burning building, both of whom were using her as a muse and projection of their own intellect?

The fire is also yet another literary reference, particularly to the Gothic genre. Vladimir executive producer and Bad Sisters creator Sharon Horgan told Elle Decor that Vladimir chooses to follow the Gothic novel trope of ending in a fire to represent the “culmination of fixation and obsession.” Horgan added, “Rebecca and Lolita are both stories about characters who are blinded by their obsession. Our protagonist is her own kind of literary heroine, and she is desperate to bring about a catharsis to her story.”

The finale feels like an inevitable cleansing of all of the complicated trio’s sins; it’s taking the hashtag #burnthepatriarchy to a whole new meaning. But is Weisz’s character’s decision really the more “progressive” choice? Similar to Julia Roberts’s professor character in the divisive 2025 film After the Hunt, Weisz’s power throughout the series is found in emulating and enabling the men around her. She coerces a younger lover and arguably assaults him, just like her decades-older husband John did to her and dozens of others before. She also rarely, if ever, attempts to defend or empathize with John’s alleged victims. Instead, she networks with their shared colleagues—and even blackmails one of them, who is also her ex—to confirm that John’s reputation will not be marred by the allegations. Weisz’s character is presented as another aspect of the old guard: the former ingenue who was sexualized early on and later learned to weaponize her own allure as a survival tactic and, later, to do exactly the same wrongs that men had done to her before.

In this finale, Weisz’s character is finally choosing herself…for better or for worse. There is a beauty in that, despite her lack of growth as a feminist. She is, at last, the literal author of her own story, even if it’s an imperfect—perhaps even ugly—one.

However, she still remains nameless in the series—either as a nod to the character being an everywoman stand-in, or as a wink to her details being redacted in an imagined case file. This choice, though, only adds to the echo of all the Vladimirs (Nabokov, Woodall, and Jonas’s book itself) that still haunt the halls of history like Rebecca’s ghost. Yes, Vladimir ends in fire, but the ashes of cyclical predatory power dynamics remain.