Anna Karenina. Vronsky's Story (2017)

What makes Anna Karenina. Vronsky’s Story feel newly alive is its daring shift in perspective: instead of replaying a familiar tragedy, it listens to the echo it left behind, asking what love, duty, and guilt look like decades later when the romance has hardened into memory. Set against the stark chill of the Russo-Japanese War, the film carries a sweeping, old-world authenticity—lavish costumes, meticulous art direction, and painterly cinematography that makes every frame feel hand-composed. The performances anchor all that beauty with real ache, letting regret and longing seep in quietly rather than shouting for tears. If you’re expecting a brisk, plot-driven melodrama, it may feel deliberate, but if you want a visually sumptuous, emotionally grown-up revisit to a classic, it’s deeply worth your time.

Anna Karenina. Vronsky’s Story is clearly trying to reframe Tolstoy’s tragedy as a reflective, war-scarred reckoning between Vronsky and Anna’s son, mixing romance with guilt and duty. The problem is it often plays more like a heavy, slow march than an emotional revelation, with characters that feel sketched in and a central relationship that doesn’t consistently spark, making the big feelings land softer than they should. If you’re coming for the novel’s nuance, psychological complexity, or sweeping romantic pull, you may find this version oddly flat and a bit self-important. Still, if you’re patient with deliberate pacing and want a somber, regret-tinged companion piece rather than a definitive Anna Karenina adaptation, there’s enough atmosphere and thematic ambition to justify a look.