Radioactive brings the life of Marie Curie to the screen as a biographical drama about discovery, love and consequence, directed by Marjane Satrapi and headlined by Rosamund Pike.
What is Radioactive about?
Paris, at the turn of the twentieth century. A stubborn, brilliant scientist from Poland struggles to be taken seriously by a male academic establishment until a chance encounter with a fellow researcher, Pierre Curie, gives her both a laboratory partner and a husband. Working in cramped conditions with almost no funding, the two isolate a new element, radium, and the achievement earns them the Nobel Prize. The film follows their partnership through public triumph and private grief, then widens its lens: Satrapi keeps cutting forward through the century to show where that faintly glowing substance eventually travelled, from hospital wards to battlefields and disaster sites, asking what it means to open a door that can never be closed again.
About the cast
Rosamund Pike heads an ensemble that includes Sam Riley, Aneurin Barnard, Anya Taylor-Joy, Simon Russell Beale, Jonathan Aris, Corey Johnson and Tim Woodward. The supporting players populate two distinct worlds, the laboratories and lecture halls of the French scientific community and the Curie family circle, and the film moves between them as its central figure ages across several decades.
Context & significance
Released in 2020, Radioactive is a co-production between the United Kingdom, France and China, running roughly 109 minutes. Its three listed genres, biography, drama and romance, describe its three layers: a portrait of a scientific pioneer, a chronicle of a marriage, and a reckoning with the long shadow of a discovery. The structure is not a straight cradle-to-grave account; instead the narrative repeatedly leaves the Curie household to visit later moments in the twentieth century that would not have happened without radium. For Persian-speaking viewers the title offers an accessible entry point into the history of modern physics and chemistry, told through a relationship rather than a lecture.
Watching Radioactive on Ktime
Radioactive streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can either hear the dialogue in Farsi or follow the original English track with on-screen translation. Reading this page is free; to start the film you need to log in with a K-Time account. The interface is built for Persian-speaking audiences, with Farsi menus and search, which makes it easy to locate the film under its Persian title, رادیو اکتیو, or its English one.