Fidelity

Fidelity (Верность, 2019) is a Russian drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Nigina Saifullaeva. Evgenia Gromova plays Lena, an obstetrician whose marriage has gone quiet in the way that is hardest to explain: her husband Seryozha, a provincial theatre actor played by Alexander Pal, is present, attentive, and somehow completely unreachable.

Lena suspects he is seeing someone. She does not ask. Instead she starts a separate life — brief encounters with strangers that give her the sense of agency she has lost at home. The parallel track begins to feel like a solution, then like an escape, then like something that is rewriting the original entirely. Saifullaeva keeps the camera close and the dialogue sparse: what happens between these two people is mostly visible in glances and in the space around unspoken words.

The film screened in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival and drew comparisons to the European auteur tradition in its restraint. It is not an easy watch, but it is a precise one — about the distance that forms inside a relationship before either person names it. Stream Fidelity (2019) on iFILM.