Broadly speaking, great works of Russian literature have a tendency to combine painfully austere themes with strangely rich imaginations. That rapturous clash, filtered through the paranoia of a guilt-driven crime thriller, helped make Fyodor Dostoevsky’s serialized 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment” a global sensation. But at the start of “The Idiot(s)” — Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s semi-surreal account of the Russian author’s disastrous European honeymoon — success sends Dostoevsky (Johnny Flynn) into a fit of writer’s block that threatens to doom him and his new wife, Anna (Aimee Lou Wood).

At least as their marriage is presented here, the Dostoevskys probably shouldn’t stay together quite as long as they do. And even packaged as a multilingual fantasy, draped in some of the most outrageously lush production design choices this side of Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” the making of “The Idiot” is nearly as frustrating to watch on film as it must have been to put on the page.

Szumowska and Englert make that misery work for them, to a point. Their ambitious film begins as the newlyweds arrive in Baden, where Fyodor’s fame attracts fellow travelers — including rival Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (Christian Friedel). The suspense that draws these particular elitists toward the Dostoevskys is the same tension that made “Crime and Punishment” magnetic for contemporary audiences, and “The Idiot(s)” echoes the queasy allure of watching someone rationalize his way toward disaster.

Fyodor, meanwhile, struggles to transform his inner turmoil into the literal “Idiot,” an intimidating totem that eventually became a dense exploration of the writer’s views on innocence, jealousy, romance, and goodness. He proves as antagonistic as his fiction in “The Idiot(s),” repeatedly gambling away what little money he and Anna have while his wife scrambles to keep them solvent.

“Pain and suffering purify the soul,” he contends, as the titular idiots submit themselves for an unfathomable amount of both across an ultimately punishing two hours. Fantasies from the perspectives of husband and wife interrupt that decline, forming an almost circus-like pattern of mutual destruction. As Anna covers for Fyodor’s addiction and increasingly unstable professional behavior, her devotion starts to look poisonous for them both.

Visions of executing her husband dance through her head with wonderful humor throughout. Still, she stays — and Wood punctuates her best scenes by swinging wildly in tone alongside the script. Grounded in tragedy and yet evoking a consistent sense of wonder, the lady of the house looks less like a mirror for her husband than a magnifying glass held over his genius and grotesquerie. (“Tell me I’m a bad Russian,” he coos in one of many bizarre kink scenes exploring the intimate side of the Dostoevskys’ relationship.)

Opposite her, Flynn does some of his best work when he is positively rotting in Fyodor’s existential anguish. At a gathering with other artists, a seemingly playful party game culminates in an excruciating monologue about child abuse. And to Flynn’s credit, Fyodor is profoundly hateable. That’s plainly the point, but Anna’s love for him provides “The Idiot(s)” with its most poignant tether to reality.

Of course, it’s not a straightforward historical account. The screenplay — credited to Szumowska, Englert, Kasper Bajon, and Bríd Arnstein — draws from Andrew D. Kaufman’s biography “The Gambler Wife,” as well as Anna’s diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and other historical research. The real Anna first worked for Dostoevsky as a stenographer who helped him complete “The Gambler” in 26 days. She did not officially co-write “The Idiot,” but she lived through its creation while managing Fyodor’s gambling, debts, epilepsy, and precarious career. Their first child also died during these years abroad.

That distinction matters because “The Idiot(s)” knowingly mixes biography with manifestations of imagination. Vicky Krieps is a particular scene-stealer as the mysterious Natasha F, a spectral variation on “The Idiot” heroine Nastasya Filippovna who barely needs to speak to haunt the starring lovers’ marriage. That device makes this sideways biopic a particularly rewarding companion piece for devotees of the novel, but it also demands a daunting amount of prior knowledge.

Viewers unfamiliar with Dostoevsky may struggle to determine which women, flirtations, and betrayals belong to history — and which come from his fiction or are the original work of Szumowska and Englert entirely. That factual slipperiness might matter less if the psychology connected more deeply. But “The Idiot(s)” explores the novel’s themes without directly adapting or fully contextualizing them, leaving the intellectual exercise richer than many of the experience’s actual rewards.

The dizzying experience of imagining “The Idiot” will always exceed any attempt to render its spirit onscreen; this film never finds a substitute for the novel’s enormous interiority. That said, the surfaces are immaculate with Englert, serving as both co-director and cinematographer, moving through the Dostoevskys’ decline with astonishing care. Ewa Mroczkowska’s production design also turns dewy embankments, decadent interiors, and sunrises over cemeteries into visions of storybook-like decay.

There is no question that these years of suffering are, in their own way, beautiful. But the love enduring at their center feels so profoundly misguided that even this extravagant tribute, arriving more than 150 years later, cannot entirely defend it.

Grade: C+

“The Idiot(s)” premiered at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival.

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As she finishes transcribing what will become one of her husband’s most enduring masterpieces, Anna Dostoevskaya (Aimee Lou Wood) cannot contain her excitement: “This is our best novel yet!” She quickly corrects herself, of course — “I mean, your best novel” — but by then, we understand she had it right the first time.

Sure, those might be Fyodor’s words on the page, and his name on the cover. But as Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert’s shrewd, playful The Idiot(s) reminds us, not even singular geniuses really do it all alone. If the film ultimately overstays its welcome, it’s hard to fault it for wanting to let this unsung companion luxuriate, for once, in the spotlight.

As Anna, Wood projects both unpolished brightness and an impressive force of will; it’s a mesmerizing combination that keeps the character from ever feeling like a mere victim of her circumstances, even as her life takes the harsh turns of, well, a Russian novel. If anything, the character’s initial introduction calls to mind Wood’s earlier breakout role on The White Lotus. Here as there, she’s the sweetly enthusiastic romantic partner to a grumpy older dude who seems determined to hate the new country they’re visiting from the moment he sets foot on it.

It’s just that in this case, her S.O. is not some revenge-driven man of mystery but a writer drowning in debt and stymied by writer’s block. But The Idiot(s) makes clear right away that it isn’t interested in the usual serious biopic clichés about serious men doing serious things. This Fyodor, played by Johnny Flynn as a comically exasperating combination of buffoonish confidence, abject self-pity and childish petulance, is first seen glowering at a woman peeling hard-boiled eggs on the train, a fantastically overwrought classical soundtrack underlining the unreasonable intensity of his moods.

He says things like “Tolstoy’s gonna shit himself” (of the novel he, Fyodor, is definitely for sure gonna start writing any day now) and “Kick me in the face” (to Anna, as part of a kinky foot-fetish debasement ritual). It’s not that the filmmakers doubt his talent as an author — the caption to that aforementioned opener, “9 a.m., the last days of November, during the thaw,” is the first of multiple affectionate nods to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot — so much as they recognize that reverence for a person’s work need not necessarily translate to admiration for his personality.

The couple have arrived in Germany ostensibly so Fyodor can work on his next project. The creatively tortured, easily distracted Fyodor, quicky sets about doing anything but. When he’s not out partying with the very upper-crust literati he claims to disdain, including rival scribe Ivan Turgenev (Christian Friedel) and his coquettish girlfriend (Vicky Krieps, alluring but underused), he’s blowing all his money at the roulette table. When he is at home, he oscillates between drunken glee and utter despair. Whenever Anna sneaks a peek at his notebooks, she finds either blank pages or doodles of naked women, not a word of The Idiot in sight.

It would all be very depressing for poor Anna, were it not for the fact that The Idiot(s) does its best to keep the phrase “poor Anna” from entering your mind for as long as it can. For one thing, the film is too busy having fun to let itself stew in misery. It’s stuffed with mischievous anachronisms like a 19th-century performance of “Take On Me,” the A-Ha hit whose pleading lyrics could double Fyodor’s entreaty to a fed-up Anna. And it delights in outrageous rococo details, like a restaurant dessert that’s essentially chocolate mousse being squeezed out the anus of a porcelain dog.

More crucially, the screenplay, by Szumowska, Englert, Kasper Bajon and Brid Arnstein, paints Anna not as some passive observer to Fyodor’s bad behavior but an active (albeit only fitfully successful) guardrail against it. As her husband gives himself over to his worst impulses, it’s Anna who nudges him to work, who tries to get the bills paid, who even, as things get dire, secretly writes and submits pages on his behalf to mollify his angry publisher. While Anna may not always be in control of her own fate, there’s never any doubt she’s in possession of her own agency.

True, she’s making the choices she does in part because she has few others: Living in a foreign land without even enough cash for a train ticket home, Anna would have a tough time leaving Fyodor even if she’d wanted to. But, The Idiot(s) makes it clear, she doesn’t especially want to.

Anna loves Fyodor truly and stubbornly, and he loves her back in his own inconsistent and imperfect way. Key to the film’s portrait of their marriage is the frisky chemistry that courses between them when they’re holding hands in bed or engaging in silly dirty talk about hard-boiled eggs. For all the relationship’s intolerable flaws and harrowing lows, it’s not without true affection.

Anna’s indulgence for his antics is another thing, however. As the situation deteriorates to the point that Anna’s pawning off her chamber pots and eating scraps off the streets, it becomes harder and harder for us as viewers to forgive his sins. Perhaps that’s why The Idiot(s) gives over large chunks of its bleaker second half to absurd dream sequences.

But arriving as they do in the umpteenth iteration of the same repetitive cycle (Fyodor losing his money, begging Anna for more, losing it all again and then some), these sequences land not only as unnecessary drags on an already puffy run time but as an uncharacteristic failure of confidence. We don’t require a clip of Fyodor fleeing from a boulder-sized roulette ball to tell us he’s being crushed by his gambling addiction when we’ve already seen that he is; we don’t need to see him plead against charges of chauvinism before a guillotine when we know exactly how poorly he treats Anna.

Then again, if the clunky pacing of the film’s latter chapters remind us of anything, it’s how long Anna toiled to help bring The Idiot into the world. Compared to all those long years, what’s a few extra minutes of sitting and watching her struggles on a screen? “Every Russian writer should have a wife like you,” Ivan marvels at one point, moved by Anna’s strenuous efforts to help her ungrateful and oblivious husband. What The Idiot(s) impishly suggests, by demonstrating all the invisible but essential labor Anna’s poured into his books, is that a lot of them probably already did.

Ben McKenzie admitted that he’d be open to signing onto a revival of “The O.C.,” but noted it would have to be under “the right circumstances.”

The actor, who played troubled teen Ryan Atwood on all four seasons of the Fox drama between 2003 and 2007, weighed in on the possibility of a revival during a recent appearance on Sydney radio station KIIS 1065.

After the interviewer pitched that McKenzie should return as “one of the dads,” referencing Peter Gallagher’s Sandy Cohen role, he revealed that he didn’t know if there were ever “serious talks” about a revival, but that he’d “be up for it.”

“Sure. Why not?” McKenzie said. “Yeah, I think so, under the right circumstances. It was a great show. We had a great time. I learned a lot. I was so young, we were all young.”

When the radio host declared that she wanted to see McKenzie the lead of an “O.C.” revival, he matched her passion and responded: “Let’s make it happen!”

Elsewhere in the interview, McKenzie admitted that he showed his 10-year-old Frances the pilot episode – a decision he went on to regret.

“I forgot that in the pilot, there is binge drinking, cigarette smoking, cocaine and a threesome,” he shared. “Of course, my 10-year-old loved it and wanted to watch more.”

Watch his comments below.

While McKenzie made it clear he’s open to participating in a revival project, he currently has his hands full, promoting his documentary film, “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” guest starring on his wife Morena Baccarin’s police procedural “Sheriff Country” and raising three kids.

In addition to “The O.C.,” McKenzie is known for his work on the crime drama “Southland,” the superhero drama “Gotham” and the Academy Award-nominated film “Junebug.”