In late-19th-century St. Petersburg, a ruthless physiologist subjects his devoted wife to a secret conditioning experiment inside their home—unaware that he is not creating the perfect human response, but carefully training the instrument of his own revenge.

SYNOPSIS:

Ivan Pavlov is a brilliant but financially struggling physiologist whose research is quietly sustained by his disciplined and self-sacrificing wife, Serafima. While he studies conditioned reflexes in his laboratory, he grows increasingly unsettled by his financial dependence on her, and by the rigid, ritualistic order that governs their home.

What begins as a private intellectual curiosity soon becomes a secret "domestic experiment."

Pavlov starts to mirror in the apartment the same behavioral patterns he observes in the laboratory, triggering responses through carefully timed sounds, rewards, and deprivations. At first the process feels almost playful, a grotesque extension of his scientific method into married life. But as the experiments intensify, the boundaries between research and intimacy collapse.

Serafima’s personality begins to erode under the weight of controlled routines, isolation, and increasingly invasive procedures. Then something happens: she adapts, observes, and learns. While Pavlov believes he is proving that human behavior can be reduced to pure mechanism, he fails to see that he too has become predictable.

In a final reversal of control, the experiment reaches its ultimate conclusion: the perfect conditioned response, one that turns the subject into the scientist, and the scientist into the outcome.

(Inspired by true events, reimagined)