Eye For Film >> Movies >> Two Prosecutors (2025) Film Review
No good deed goes unpunished in Two Prosecutors, the first fiction feature in seven years from Sergei Loznitsa, the acclaimed Ukrainian filmmaker best known for his historical documentaries. Returning to one of the director's key themes, the brutal horrors of the Soviet justice system under Stalin, this crisply composed period drama inevitably has a timely dimension today, inviting parallels with Putin's Russia and other authoritarian regimes. World premiered in Cannes, it is playing this week at Warsaw Film Festival, where the lingering scars of repressive Kremlin rule feel particularly raw.
If Marx was right about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce, Loznitsa is keeping a firm grip on both in this classy, Kafka-esque literary thriller. Relentlessly sombre, but lightly sprinkled with the director's signature black humour, Two Prosecutors is based on a novella of the same name by Georgy Demidov, written in 1969 but only published decades later. A former physicist arrested on trumped-up charges during the Stalinist purges, Demidov spent 18 years in jail, mostly in Siberia's notoriously harsh Kolyma region. Even after official rehabilitation in 1958, his writing was sporadically censored and seized by the Soviet authorities. Less celebrated or widely translated than other gulag chroniclers, notably Solzhenitsyn, his work was mostly published posthumously following his death in 1987.
Set in 1937, Two Prosecutors opens inside a grim jail in Bryansk, a small industrial city 230 miles south-west of Moscow. The routinely sadistic guards enlist a veteran prisoner to burn a huge pile of letters from inmates, addressed to Stalin himself, fruitlessly pleading for clemency. Despite great risk, the old-timer saves one letter from the fire, a tiny scrap written in blood. Miraculously, he somehow passes the note on to Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), an idealistic young prosecutor straight out of law school. With his strikingly angular, broken-nosed boxer's face, Ukrainian rising star Kuznetsov makes a quietly compelling lead here, pitching Kornyev somewhere between poet and prize-fighter.
When Kornyev arrives at the jail to request a meeting with the letter's author, Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), the guards treat his mission with incredulity and scorn. Doggedly persistent in the face of bureaucratic stonewalling, he finally secures access to Stepniak. His cell is filthy, his body scarred and bruised from multiple beatings. By refusing to sign a forced confession, he has effectively condemned himself to death. But as a proud Bolshevik and former prosecutor himself, he remains a true believer in “Soviet justice”, blaming his wrongful incarceration on corrupt elements within the local secret police, the NKVD, rather than the whole rotten system.
Kornyev agrees to take on Stepniak's case and sets off to Moscow, audaciously hoping for a meeting with Comrade Stalin himself. On his journey he shares a packed train carriage with a one-legged First World War veteran who shares a colourful shaggy dog story about begging Lenin himself for a charitable hand-out. Inspired by Ukrainian absurdist maestro Nikolai Gogol, as cited by Loznitsa in the credits, this monologue sequence is the film's main comic relief, bleakly funny though it may be. In a wry casting choice, the old soldier is a dual role for Filippenko, the clownish mirror image of his tragic turn as Stepniak.
Unfolding with all the inevitably of an ancient Greek tragedy, Two Prosecutors is mostly a coldly compelling exercise in fatalism. There are few surprise twists here, just a deepening sense of dread. After facing more granite-faced bureaucrats in Moscow, Kornyev's train journey home takes on an increasingly ominous air, his earnest intentions sidelined by betrayal and deception. The bitter irony here is how the two characters with most devout faith in the Soviet Communist system are those most cruelly punished by it. Everybody around them is a knowingly cynical cog in Stalin's giant oppression machine, careful not to question orders from above, utterly disinterested in morality or justice. Under a brutally unjust system, innocent idealism is not just risky but potentially fatal.
Working again with cinematographer Oleg Mutu, feted for his pioneering role in the Romanian New Wave boom, Loznitsa fills Two Prosecutors with arresting visual tableaux, their Academy ratio framing adding to their precise, painterly look. This poised, controlled aesthetic transforms almost every scene into an an Old Master canvas, which certainly helps a story rooted in lengthy, talk-heavy interior scenes. Christiaan Verbeek's sparely deployed orchestral folk score is another strong element, by turns plaintive and ironically cheery.
Two Prosecutors may be one of Loznitza's most formally conventional films to date, but it is an impeccably crafted work, chillingly restrained and quietly devastating. For fans of obscure cinematic connections, its author Demidov was also a student of experimental physicist Lev Landau, whose life and work inspired maverick director Ilya Khrzhanovsky's monumental multi-media film/theatre/art project DAU. With fateful symmetry, Khrzhanovsky was recently denounced and exiled for criticising Putin's authoritarian regime. This slow-motion tragedy may take place almost a century ago, but is not over yet.
Reviewed on: 14 Oct 2025
