The Washing Machine (2020) Plot Summary & Timeline

Three eccentric sisters, the Kolbas, share a single penthouse and their days are a portrait of contrasting appetites and hidden resentments. Vida, the spoiled temptress, commands attention with a careless smile and a taste for drama. Ludmilla, the lonely voyeur, watches the world from the shadows, while Maria, the bisexual sister who keeps a black cat as a silent witness, moves through the apartment with a calculated ease that keeps both friends and rivals guessing. Their life together unravels with the arrival of Yuri Petkov, Vida’s ex, whose unsettling presence and criminal past begin to bleed into the sisters’ carefully managed reality.

The trouble begins when Vida ends things with Yuri after discovering he engraved a bracelet bearing Maria’s nickname, a small symbol that becomes a fuse for a larger, more dangerous truth. One night, Ludmilla notices the washing machine running and blood spilling from the door, a sight that would shake any ordinary investigation. When the door finally opens, Yuri’s body is found dismembered inside the machine, an image so shocking that Ludmilla collapses before she can run. By the time the police arrive, Yuri’s remains have vanished, leaving behind only questions and a sense that something far more tangled is at play.

Inspector Alexander Stacev is assigned to the case, and his early assessment minimizes the incident as nothing more than a drunken hallucination. He, however, becomes entangled with the sisters in ways he did not anticipate. Ludmilla, using a mix of charm and manipulation, reaches out to him, hinting that Ludmilla’s sister may have been driven by jealousy, a claim designed to place doubt in the inspector’s mind. Vida, with her pointed wit, tries to seduce him to sway his judgment, while insisting that the jealousy behind the supposed “murder” is all part of a forbidden love triangle. Stacev resists, yet the intrigue deepens when Nikolai, a colleague of Stacev’s, informs him that crucial files tied to Petkov’s criminal past have gone missing.

The sisters oscillate between cooperation and obstruction as Stacev questions them. Ludmilla darkly contributes love letters from Yuri to Maria, which Maria explains away by saying she and her blind girlfriend Nidaya teased Yuri into a sham relationship, a ruse designed to test Yuri’s loyalties. Vida comes forward with an alternative narrative, presenting a letter she claims is in Yuri’s handwriting, and she invites Stacev to break into Yuri’s apartment with her in what reads at first as a bid for truth, but quickly reveals itself as a setup to exploit the inspector. In a brutal moment, Vida cuffs Stacev to a stairwell and rapes him, a betrayal that only adds to the web of deceit swirling around the case and to the tension between the investigators and the Kolbas.

Nikolai, a rookie, makes a critical misstep by withholding the fact that Stacev’s fingerprints were found at the scene, a detail that becomes a point of contention and a lesson in how quickly information can shift the balance of power in a tense investigation. The sisters keep altering their stories, vanishing when questioned, and presenting increasingly strange accounts. Maria claims she saw her cat eat Yuri’s hand on a plate; Ludmilla asserts clairvoyance, insisting she foresaw Yuri’s murder in a dream before it happened; and Ludmilla’s story about her husband’s drowning in a canal is used to keep the truth at bay while the sisters pursue their own version of events.

Maria, with a deft mix of seduction and manipulation, draws Stacev into intimate encounters, especially during a seminar she and Nidaya organize for blind students, where she and her partner kiss as they flaunt the fact that Nidaya cannot see them. In parallel, Stacev’s relationship with Irina – a lawyer who is also his partner in life – becomes strained as she recognizes that the Kolbas are deliberately steering him toward a romantic entanglement. Irina’s anger burns hot, and she ultimately takes her own life rather than be used by the unfolding plot. When she dies, the emotional toll on Stacev intensifies, and he is left to confront the murky ethics of a case that has spiraled far beyond the realm of traditional crime.

Back at headquarters, two German career criminals are brought in, and their testimony complicates the picture: they confirm seeing Yuri entering the Kolbas penthouse outside the time frame the sisters claim, suggesting that Yuri may have staged events or that someone else was involved. The sisters’ confessions evolve into multiple versions: Ludmilla claims a sexual encounter with Yuri on the washing machine, followed by electrocution from a loose wire; Maria claims she walked in on them, offered herself, and then Yuri was stabbed. Throughout these revelations, Stacev’s tea is drugged, and he is haunted by disturbing dreams in which Vida appears to be tearing Yuri apart, a nightmare that blurs the line between possibility and manipulation.

As the investigation unfolds, Stacev discovers a suitcase full of jewels and cash that had been intended for the sisters. He takes the bundle to his apartment, intending to accumulate real evidence before acting, a plan that risks tipping the balance toward a confrontation that could ruin him. Maria confronts him at the conservatory where she and Ludmilla perform, showing him photographs of him with all three sisters. She uses blackmail to threaten his career while professing love and a desire to run away with him and the riches. Stacev remains cautious, unsure who is telling the truth, whether any of them can be trusted, and whether his own career or his life could be destroyed by becoming entangled with the Kolbas.

Meanwhile, an unseen thief targets Stacev’s apartment, stealing the jewel-laden suitcase, and the culprit is eventually revealed to be Nikolai, who has turned against the others in pursuit of his own gain. Before Stacev can make use of the wealth, he is killed in a brutal moment: his life ends with his strangled body found in a chilling, dismembered state inside the same washer that started this entire sequence. The sisters reveal themselves, returning the stolen jewels to the safe rooms of power and letting their own brand of joy and cunning reassert itself. Yuri, meanwhile, is shown to be very much alive, a fact that raises the stakes even higher. Nidaya appears, having warned that Maria must stay within the family’s orbit, or else face consequences, and the sisters rally around Maria in a tense moment of forced solidarity.

Yuri’s threats to kill Maria if she does not agree to join the family become the ultimate leverage, and a staged group photo with Stacev still inside the washing machine marks the moment of truth. In a final act of retribution and control, Maria throws an iron into Yuri’s running bath, electrocuting him in a brutal act that serves as a grim countermeasure to his earlier deception. The five sisters close in on Maria as the scene ends, and they all burst into a dark, shared laugh, the sound echoing through the penthouse as they cement their hold on the situation and each other.

If you’re exploring this story, the aura of danger, manipulation, and opaque loyalty threads its way through every encounter, from the manipulation of investigators to the entwined romantic entanglements and the ruthless calculus that underlines every action. The film lingers on the tension between truth and performance, showing how each character’s desire for control can distort reality and leave others to navigate a maze of motives, where the line between victim and perpetrator becomes increasingly blurred, and where the ultimate power may lie in the collective decision to laugh together at the chaos they have created.