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Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Two Prosecutors' Review: Sergei Loznitsa's Chilling Soviet Drama Is A Bleak Warning From History
Sergei Loznitsa's forensically objective, intellectually nuanced documentaries tend to stand in stark contrast to his fictional output; in films like My Joy, In the Fog and Donbass, the Ukrainian director is inclined to put his cards on the table, usually addressing his signature subject: the abject failure of the Russian state. Two Prosecutors follows in that tradition, being a very slow and very talky chamber piece that could be the most terrifying comedy that Aki Kaurismäki never made, or a Chaplin-esque horror film about the evils of bureaucracy in a world ruled by morons. This time, Loznitsa doesn't just have the Kremlin in his sights; Two Prosecutors is one of his most accessible films to date, with relevance to every country wrestling with authoritarian political parties right now. Based on a novella by Soviet and political activist Georgy Demidov (1908-1987), Two Prosecutors begins with a screen credit noting the year as 1937 ('The height of Stalin's terror'). A prison door opens, and a procession of broken men file out into the yard. 'This is your work gang,' a warden tells his colleague. 'What a fine bunch,' is the sarcastic reply. One especially old, dishevelled man is singled out for special duties; his job is to sit by a stove in an empty cell, incinerating a huge pile of folded papers. It transpires that they are letters, written to the dear leader by men being held illegally, having been forced to confess to imaginary crimes by NKVD, the USSR's secret service. He will never read them. More from Deadline Scarlett Johansson On Why The Script For Her Directorial Debut 'Eleanor The Great' Made Her Cry: 'It's About Forgiveness' – Cannes Cover Story Cannes Film Festival 2025 in Photos: Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, 'Sound Of Falling' & 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' Premieres 'The Little Sister' Review: Nadia Melliti Makes A Striking Debut In Hafsia Herzi's Seductive Coming-Out Story - Cannes Film Festival The old man is warned of dire consequences should he give any of the letters a reprieve. Nevertheless, he tucks one away, a missive written in blood and addressed to the Bryansk Prosecutor's Office. Somehow, it gets to its intended destination, and sometime after that, the first of the two prosecutors — a recent graduate called Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) — arrives at the prison asking to see the governor. Instead, he gets his deputy, who tries to fob him off with the Russian equivalent of 'he's in a meeting.' But Kornyev insists, demanding access to a prisoner named Stepniak. RELATED: The deputy goes to see the governor, who is lounging in his office on a leather sofa. 'Some student has turned up,' he says, and the two make plans to leave him hanging around in the deputy's office, hoping he'll just get bored and go. But Kornyev does not go, so the governor tells him that Stepniak has a contagious disease, reeling off a list of terrible diseases that are doing the rounds, like typhoid, diphtheria and much, much worse. Kornyev is undeterred, so the governor allows his request, albeit with a sinister warning. 'Washing your hands with soap won't save you from certain infections,' he says, an innocent enough line just dripping with barely concealed violence. Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) is in solitary confinement, and reveals to Kornyev what's going on in the prison. Lifting up his clothing, he reveals weeping red welts and purple lesions all over his body ('That's how things are, laddy… My urine is red.'). Stepniak explains that the Soviet secret service, the NKVD, has infiltrated local government and are busily installing a kakistocracy, targeting older party members and taking them out with especially harsh punishments. Kornyev, a fine, upstanding Communist, is shocked at this contempt for the law of his land, and gets a train back to the city, where he demands an urgent meeting with the Prosecutor General. The pace is painfully methodical, as Kornyev faces obstruction and obfuscation at every level, enduring Kafka-esque levels of red tape before the Prosecutor General will even agree to see him. What separates this from, say, a Roy Andersson movie is the creeping sense of Parallax View-style menace that sets in; there's a sense that Kornyev is getting in over his head, never quite reading the room and making enemies that are each cumulatively more dangerous than the last. The set design is terrific in this regard; statues of Lenin and Stalin watch over airless, wood-paneled rooms bathed in a passive-aggressive Soviet glaze of green. In previous years, this might have seemed like more of a very local, and, culturally, very specific story, more of a cautionary tale about what might happen to us in the West if our democracies are not protected. It used to be a case of there but for the grace of God…, but in 2025, life is coming at all of us hard and fast. Two Prosecutors is a bleak warning from history, one that will only seem more and more prophetic with the passing of time — and that time starts now. Title: Two ProsecutorsFestival: Cannes (Competition)Director: Sergei LoznitsaScreenwriter: Sergei Loznitsa, based on the novella Two Prosecutors by Georgy DemidovCast: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy BeliySales company: SBS InternationalRunning time: 1 hr 53 mins Best of Deadline Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Winners Through The Years Deadline Studio At Sundance Film Festival Photo Gallery: Dylan O'Brien, Ayo Edebiri, Jennifer Lopez, Lily Gladstone, Benedict Cumberbatch & More
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Two Prosecutors review – a petrifying portrait of Stalinist insurrection
An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie from Sergei Loznitsa, set in Stalin's Russia of the late 30s and based on a story by the dissident author and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was held in the gulag for 14 years during the second world war and harassed by the state until his death in the late 1980s. The resulting movie, with its slow, extended scenes from single camera positions, mimics the zombie existence of the Soviet state and allows a terrible anxiety to accumulate: it is about a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with a bacillus of guilt. There is something of Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead and also – with the appearance of two strangely grinning, singing men in a railway carriage – Kafka's The Castle. Loznitsa moreover allows us also to register that the wretched political prisoner of his tale is a veteran of Stalin's brutal battle to suppress the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura. And given the nightmarish claustrophobia and disorientation in the scenes in cells, official corridors, staircases and government antechambers, there is maybe a filmic footnote in the fact that Demidov worked for the scientist Lev Landau, the subject of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's huge and deeply pessimistic multi-movie installation project Dau in 2020. The first prosecutor of the title is Kornyev, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, an idealistic young lawyer, given a startlingly early promotion to a state prosecutor role – his beardless youth fascinates and irritates the grizzled old time-servers with whom he comes into contact. He has received a bizarre 'letter' from Stepniak (Aleksandr Fillipenko) an ageing and desperately ill high security prisoner in Bryansk – written in blood on a piece of torn cardboard (which has escaped the bonfire that prison authorities make of protest letters like these). The letter alleges that the security services, the NKVD, are without reference to the rule of law, using the prisons and judicial system to torture and murder an entire older generation of party veterans like him, to bring in a fanatically loyal but callow and incompetent cohort of Stalin loyalists. The prison authorities make the politely persistent Kornyev wait hours before being allowed to visit Stepniak in his cell, transparently hoping he will just give up and go away – Loznitsa shows this weaponised inertia is the traditional official approach to petitioners everywhere in the Soviet Union. They also claim that the prisoner's ill health and possible infection mean Kornyev really should 'postpone' his visit. It is an obvious obfuscation and yet the idea of getting infected by Stepniak has a weird and queasy relevance. Horrified by Stepniak's appalling condition and the evidence of torture, and aware of Stepniak's own respected legal scholarship and expertise (he is perhaps the second prosecutor of the title), Kornyev gets on a train to Moscow to raise his concerns with the highest possible authority – convinced that the locals will do nothing – and this is the deadpan chief prosecutor Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) who makes Kornyev wait hours just like the prison governor and listens to his explosive allegations with unsettlingly attentive calm. From here, there are more bizarre hints of an occult conspiracy to frighten and deter and contain Kornyev – meetings with people who appear to have nothing to do with each other but who, like the various neighbours in Rosemary's Baby, are in fact connected. On the train to Moscow, Kornyev encounters a garrulous old soldier with a wooden leg who is an eerie doppelganger of the prisoner Stepniak (and played by the same actor) and who makes wisecracks about young Kornyev being a virgin which are to be uncannily echoed later. In the government building, Kornyev meets a young man who claims to be his law-school contemporary, pointedly asking about this case he is pursuing – but Kornyev can't remember ever having met him before. And most disturbingly of all, Kornyev runs into a strange man, perhaps a petitioner, who stands up against the wall motionless, evidently paralysed with fear, hoping that no official person will talk to him and who asks Kornyev in a low whisper which is the way out of there. Perhaps Kornyev himself should himself become very inconspicuous and motionless before making his own exit. It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny. Two Prosecutors screened at the Cannes film festival
