Many Russian subtitle files use Windows-1251 (CP-1251) encoding, while modern players expect UTF-8 . The Fix:
The story follows a young woman named Lera (stage name Gerda) who studies sociology by day and works as a pole dancer at a club by night to support her mother. It is a gritty, atmospheric look at life in provincial Russia, blending social realism with surreal dream sequences. subtitle Gerda.RUSSIAN.BluRay.x264-VXTGerda.RUS...
In VLC Media Player , you can also go to Tools > Preferences > Subtitles / OSD and set the "Default encoding" to Cyrillic (Windows-1251) . subtitle Gerda.RUSSIAN.BluRay.x264-VXTGerda.RUS...
Open the .srt file in a text editor like or Notepad++ . Select "Reopen with Encoding" -> "Cyrillic (Windows 1251)". subtitle Gerda.RUSSIAN.BluRay.x264-VXTGerda.RUS...