Лето волков (Season 1)

Summer of Wolves (Лето волков, 2011) is a Russian wartime drama series you can watch online on iFILM. A young lieutenant, on leave after a wound, comes back to his home village — deep rear country by frontline standards. Ringed by forest, the place looks untouched by the war, almost exactly as he left it. And yet nothing is quite right.

The girl who swore she'd "wait forever" refuses to even speak to him. Old neighbours keep their distance. And his grandmother, the kind angel of his childhood, begs him to take the medals off his tunic and never set foot in the woods. When a string of brutal killings begins, the soldier is forced into a fight with whoever is hiding in the forest thickets. But to reach the killers, he first has to work out which of his own villagers is tied to them.

Aleksey Bardukov, Yulia Peresild, Maria Kulikova and Oleg Taktarov lead the cast. The show lives not on battle scenes but on a suffocating sense that the enemy is one of your own, someone you've known since childhood. A good pick for fans of war stories wrapped around a mystery, where every cottage hides a suspect. Stream Summer of Wolves online on iFILM.