Poisons or the World History of Poisoning (2001): Cast & Plot

Oleg Volkov and his wife Katya move into a newly bought apartment and quickly become acquainted with their locksmith neighbor Arnold Sharapov. What starts as a warm, ordinary evening soon tilts when Katya, during a friendly dinner, betrays her husband, sparking a tangle of jealousy, suspicion, and disappointment that threads through the entire building.

After the fallout, Oleg sinks into alcohol and, at a dim bar, he meets the pensioner Prokhorov, Ivan Petrovich Prokhorov. Prokhorov speaks in a chilling, matter-of-fact way about his own punishment for infidelity—slipping poison into his wife’s yogurt—and he quietly presses Oleg to consider a similar act. He carries with him a small collection of poisons, a quiet arsenal of past misdeeds that he insists could change the course of a life.