Black WidowSave

Ohio, 1995. A suburban Columbus cul-de-sac at dusk. A perfect American family of four — dad Alexei, mom Melina, two daughters Natasha and Yelena — has just finished dinner. The girls (Natasha at twelve, Yelena at six) are playing in the front yard. The opening titles credit "Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana, Malia J. cover)" over the family's nighttime activities — Alexei mowing the lawn, Melina making pancakes, Natasha walking her sister to school. It's an American Mom-and-Dad-with-two-kids Norman Rockwell scene. Then the camera reveals: their mailbox has a Cyrillic surname under the American one, their basement has a comms-array radio that broadcasts in Russian, and Melina has a Russian-language SHIELD employee badge taped above her workbench. The Shostakov family is a Soviet sleeper cell. Alexei (David Harbor, the Russian super-soldier Red Guardian) is a Soviet enhanced operative; Melina (Rachel Weisz) is a Russian intelligence biochemist. Natasha and Yelena are not their biological daughters — they're trafficked Russian orphans being raised as deep-cover assets for the Soviet espionage program known as the Red Room.

The cover gets blown. A SHIELD strike team arrives at the cul-de-sac. Alexei, in his Red Guardian armor (red-white-blue Soviet supersoldier uniform), holds off SHIELD agents while Melina, Natasha, and Yelena flee in a Cessna to a Cuban airfield. They land. Yelena hugs her sister. Then armored Soviet officers tear them apart on the runway tarmac. Yelena is loaded into one van marked Red Room, Natasha into another. They scream for each other across the tarmac. The girls are taken to General Dreykov's training facility on a floating military base where they will be conditioned, brainwashed, and trained as Black Widow assassins. Natasha will spend the next fifteen years killing for Dreykov until SHIELD recruits her, and Yelena will spend twenty.

Cut to 2016. Two months after the events of Civil War (2016). Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross has put a $20M federal bounty on Natasha Romanoff for violating the Sokovia Accords by helping Cap escape after the airport battle. Natasha is on the run with no team, no SHIELD support, and no Avengers to back her up. She's traveling solo through Eastern Europe, then by car to Norway, where she meets her old SHIELD-era fixer Rick Mason. Mason has arranged a hidden cabin in a fjord and a phony Belgian passport. She settles in to wait out the Avengers' fragmentation.

Meanwhile, Morocco. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, exactly Natasha's age now in real life, the spitting image of Natasha at twelve) is on assignment as a Red Room Widow assassin. She's been sent to retaliate against a rogue Widow who has been sending classified red-vial chemicals out of the Red Room facility. Yelena tracks the rogue Widow to a Marrakech hotel. They fight. The dying Widow sprays Yelena with one of the red vials — a synthesized antidote her former Red Room sister had been developing to break the pheromone-chemical brainwashing the Widows are all subjected to. Yelena's mind clears in real time. She realizes, for the first time in twenty years, that she has not been free. She kills the Widow she was sent to assassinate as a friend. She takes the vials. She sends the entire shipment to a forwarding address she's been saving for years — to her sister Natasha.

The vials arrive at Natasha's Norway cabin in a Soviet-stamped wooden crate. Then Taskmaster — a faceless mercenary in Soviet armor with biometric reflexes that can mirror any combat opponent's signature moves — attacks the cabin. Natasha barely escapes with the vials. She follows the address on the package back to Budapest where Yelena is hiding in a safe-house apartment.

Budapest. Natasha breaks into the safe-house at 3 AM expecting an ambush. Yelena, asleep on the couch, hears her, and they fight through the apartment in a brutal, very personal hand-to-hand brawl that destroys most of the furniture. They end the fight side-by-side on the floor of the kitchen, both bleeding, breathing hard. Yelena gives Natasha the actual debrief: Dreykov is still alive. The Red Room is still operating. Natasha had previously believed her 2008 assassination of Dreykov (a Red Room blast Hawkeye and Natasha pulled off in Budapest) had killed him; it turns out Dreykov survived, used the blast as a propaganda death-fake, and rebuilt the Red Room as a floating black-site facility in the upper atmosphere. The pheromone-control molecule he's been using on his Widow agents is keyed to his own scent — every Widow, by chemical conditioning, is incapable of attacking him in person. Yelena's vials are the antidote. She wants Natasha to help her break into the Red Room and kill Dreykov for real. Natasha agrees. The sisters reunite.

Prison break. The first step in Natasha and Yelena's plan is to retrieve Alexei, who has been in a Soviet supermax prison since 1995 after he stayed behind to fight SHIELD. Alexei has been there for twenty-one years, telling the entire prison block ridiculous stories about how he was Captain America's Cold War rival before he was incarcerated. The sisters break into the prison via a helicopter assault on the exercise yard. They cut Alexei out of his cell. They have to break him out of his cell at exactly the moment he is bench-pressing 800 pounds because he hasn't worked out for an hour and wants to prove he's still the Red Guardian. The prison riot during the breakout is the film's most over-the-top sequence — Alexei pile-driving five Russian guards through three walls, gunfire flying through the cell block, Natasha and Yelena coordinating crossfire from opposite balconies. They escape via the prison roof in a stolen helicopter.

Russia, an undisclosed farm in the steppes. Melina lives in a rural farmhouse outside St. Petersburg, raising pigs and continuing her work for the Red Room as a pheromone-engineering chemist. The sisters and Alexei travel there to gather intelligence on Dreykov's floating Red Room. Melina is a tense reunion — she had loved the girls when she raised them in Ohio, but she has spent twenty years coordinating Red Room operations. She makes them dinner. She drinks vodka. She tells them she always loved them. Then she pages Dreykov from her workshop the moment they're asleep and reports the family's location. Pigs squeal in the barn. Dreykov's forces, with Taskmaster, arrive at the farm at dawn.

Natasha and Melina swap identities using face-mask technology Melina has been developing — both look identical to each other on capture cameras. "Melina" (actually Natasha) is captured by Dreykov's forces and dragged aboard a Red Room cargo plane to the floating facility. The real Melina, Yelena, and Alexei follow in a stolen Russian aircraft. The floating Red Room — a thirty-story flying fortress with multiple ring-decks, suspended in the upper atmosphere by experimental anti-gravity systems — comes into view above the clouds. It's huge. It's the size of a city block. It is housing hundreds of brainwashed Widow assassins.

Infiltration. Natasha, posing as Melina, is brought to Dreykov's personal chambers in the Red Room's top deck. Dreykov (Ray Winstone) is in his late sixties, in a Soviet officer's uniform, half his face scarred from the 2008 Budapest blast Natasha thought had killed him. He reveals his daughter Antonia — the girl Natasha thought she had killed alongside Dreykov in the 2008 attack — is alive and grown. Antonia is the Taskmaster. Antonia was disabled in the 2008 blast and Dreykov has rebuilt her with a neural-mimicry implant in her brain that allows her to mirror any combat opponent's fighting style. Antonia has been Dreykov's perfect bodyguard for ten years. Dreykov plans to use Natasha to convince the Avengers to assassinate world leaders on his behalf — Natasha had no choice but to play along, because Dreykov's pheromone-chemical lock means she cannot physically attack him.

Natasha breaks the lock. In the film's most viscerally awkward moment, Natasha breaks her own nose against Dreykov's desk to physically disable her olfactory nerves — the sensory mechanism the pheromones are keyed to. Without the lock, she can attack him. She lunges at him with a hidden blade. Dreykov triggers a fail-safe and seals the room. Antonia attacks Natasha. They fight through the Red Room's upper deck. Meanwhile, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina have boarded the Red Room from the outside in their stolen plane. Yelena is throwing red vials of antidote into the Red Room's ventilation system, breaking the pheromone-control on every Widow inside the facility simultaneously. The Widows — three hundred women who have been Dreykov's slaves for years — start to wake up.

The Red Room collapses. The facility's anti-gravity engines start failing under combat damage. The floating fortress tilts on its axis and begins falling through the cloud layer. Natasha and Yelena pursue Antonia/Taskmaster through the falling structure. Natasha defeats Antonia. She removes Antonia's neural implant. Antonia, free of Dreykov's control for the first time in twenty years, is shaking on the floor. "I don't know who I am." "You don't have to be what he made you." Natasha hands her a Widow-issue grappling line. They both escape via parachutes. Dreykov is killed in the Red Room's final crash — the structure plows into a Russian forest at terminal velocity and Dreykov is incinerated. The Red Room is gone. Three hundred Widows are freed.

Aftermath. Mason meets Natasha at a forest airfield. He delivers her stolen Avengers Quinjet, which she's going to use to find Cap and the team after the events of Civil War. Natasha says goodbye to Yelena, Alexei, and Melina on the tarmac. Yelena — now operating as a freelance ex-Widow — hands Natasha a tactical vest like the one Yelena has been wearing the whole film. "It has so many pockets. You'll love it." Natasha smiles. She boards the Quinjet and flies west to find Cap, Sam Wilson, and Wanda in their post-Sokovia-Accords hiding. The film ends with Natasha taking off into the sunrise. She has two years until Thanos. She has a family now.