Poisons or the World History of Poisoning 2001

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.

Oleg confronts the moral abyss and hesitates, but a new chain of events pulls him away from the brink. A quarrel within the family forces him to leave his home, and he becomes a guest of Zoya, Arnold’s wife, who has expelled her own unfaithful husband. The two find comfort in each other and gradually fall in love, deciding to forge a life together despite the shattered loyalties around them.

Weathering envy and anger, the former spouses—Arnold and Katya—plot to break the new idyll. They invite Oleg and Zoya to a dinner and plot to feed them contaminated burgers, a plan meant to sever the growing bond. The tension escalates as Oleg seeks counsel from Prokhorov, who offers a series of cunning retaliatory steps, each more devious than the last, testing Oleg’s resolve and moral compass.

Yet, in a turn toward a gentler resolution, Oleg decides to step back from the cycle of revenge. The two couples divorce, and Oleg and Zoya begin a life together built on love and shared interests, free from the bitterness that had threatened to fracture them all.

Throughout the unfolding drama, Oleg’s daydreams—fueled by Prokhorov’s tales of famed poisoners—drift into vivid visions. The most looming figure in his reveries is Pope Alexander VI Borgia, a central figure in these scheming fantasies, underscoring the movie’s themes of power, betrayal, and the peril of following dangerous echoes from the past. Pope Alexander VI