'The Idiot(s)' Review: Flynn's Drunken Dostoevsky — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "The Idiot(s)" is a biographical dramedy directed by Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, based on Andrew D. Kaufman's non-fiction novel "The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky."
- Johnny Flynn portrays Fyodor Dostoevsky as a wretched gambler, drunken fool, and childish arrogant man drowning in bodily fluids during the couple's honeymoon in Germany — deliberately detached from the polished intellectual image of the author.
- Aimee Lou Wood plays Anna Dostoevsky, the younger wife who carries as much dramatic weight as Fyodor: making backdoor deals to keep the couple financially afloat, transcribing his manuscripts, and emerging as the film's unassuming, credit-deserving force.
- The film employs scatological humor, cringe comedy, and anachronistic touches including a pared-down, beat-less rendition of A-ha's "Take on Me," signaling its playful rejection of 19th-century solemnity.
- Christian Friedel (of "The Zone of Interest") plays assimilated Russian rival Ivan Turgeniev in an impromptu dance-off, while Vicky Krieps portrays an aristocrat who revels with vicious snark in the era's moral decay.
- The film functions as a deliberate exercise in separating art from artist, exposing Dostoevsky's debauchery and self-destruction while affirming that his literary work's value persists independently of his personal flaws.
Why it matters: The biopic deliberately demystifies Dostoevsky by depicting him as a gambling, vomiting mess rather than an intellectual giant — a creative risk from Szumowska and Englert that gives Aimee Lou Wood's Anna as much screen weight as Flynn's Fyodor, flipping the conventional hagiographic biopic template and positioning the often-overlooked wife as the real hero.
Ask SkimNews
