‘Two Prosecutors’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa Makes a Striking Return to Fiction Filmmaking in Chilling Fable Set Across Stalin’s Purges (2025)

This is a film about Russia, set in Russia, and made by a filmmaker educated there, yet it was produced by France,Germany, the Netherlands, Latvia,Romania, andLithuania. And that is very apparent with the mass of production vanity plates prior to an opening shot (indeed, these international co-production methods are how worthy films are typically made).

“Two Prosecutors”’ director Sergei Loznitsa claims Ukraine as the closest element of his post-Soviet heritage, and resides in Berlin, but he has all the attributes of a dissident filmmaker, criticizing and scrutinizing something he intimately knows. It would be nice to see Russian-produced films made under a culture of free expression, but our relative compensation are programmes and films with English dialogue like “Chernobyl” and “Doctor Zhivago”, numerous bad ones with worse accents, and also “Two Prosecutors”, shot in Latvia, but authentic as anything.

Loznitsa made arguably his best film to date with the astonishingly prescient “Donbass” in 2018; the pandemic and his extraordinary jones for amassing rare archive in his docs kept him away from fiction filmmaking since. A mass book pulping of great Russian authors in his present tense Ukraine-Russia war study “The Invasion”, which was at Cannes last year, provides a seed for his competition entry “Two Prosecutors”, adapted from the little-known Russian author Georgy Demidov, whose novella of the same name details his experiences of incarceration during Stalin’s 1937 Great Terror, was written several decades after in 1969, and only saw publication in 2009 after his manuscripts were seized in 1980 by the KGB.

The titular “two prosecutors” signify in the mildly absurdist sense of “The Two Popes” or “The Two Jakes”: the main protagonist, the newly hired, young municipal lawyer Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), goes tête-à-tête with several double or doppelgänger figures, principally his former law school professor Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a member of the Bolshevik revolutionary generation now dubiously imprisoned himself.

Almost a tonal “intake of breath”, the film’s transfixing prologue proceeds largely sans dialogue, or rather the mumbling and muttering dialogue there is nestles in a pleasing void of silence. Initially set at a forbidding, suitably labyrinthine prison in Bryansk, an aged convict is given the mind-numbing but time-passing task of destroying prisoners’ letters appealing to Stalin himself for their faulty punishments, when he finds a message literally written in blood by Stepniak addressed instead to the local district prosecutor (perhaps not thinking he’ll be greeted by the green, baby-faced Kornyev).

Kornyev is the archetypal, idealistic new recruit heading for a world of pain, and Loznitsa’s adaptation sends him on a prosecutor’s “progress” (a “bureaucratic procedural” might also be the film’s genre tag), to reach Stepniak. Referencing Kafka is low-hanging literary fruit, but the obstacles faced are surreally impenetrable. First, he has to find out which particular cursed and ratty part of the prison his new client is in; state his business and authorize his identity, and have that ratified by a superior, for whom he’ll wait several hours to see (he even takes a nap, and no one cares); be warned by the threat of venereal disease infection; have to endure the entirety of this again, at half-speed, and so on, and so forth. The effectiveness and subtle suspense of Loznita’s visuals are matched by the chamber-piece intensity of the characters’ verbal face-offs, dense with specialist jargon and gallows humor, and not giving a damn if you can’t keep up.

Surprise, surprise: Stepniak is incarcerated for no defined reason, and he’s faced severe physical punishment, with Loznitsa disturbing us by unveiling — but never sadistically gloating in — the broken ribs and discoloring bruises on his torso. With Orwell’s “1984” of course largely inspired by Soviet totalitarianism, he really has been put away for a “thoughtcrime”; merely being of an era where Trotsky flourished at the top of the party makes him a watched man. Or a percentage of a fraction of a risk — better lock him up, than risk a speck of backlash.

Further, supplementary prosecutors are in store for Kornyev’s Moscow meeting schedule, with Stepniak suggesting he consult legal officials at the Party’s summit. Meeting the steely-eyed general prosecutor Vyshynsky (Anatoli Beliy), Kornyev has dirty tricks and accusations of his own to use strategically — for example, that the local branch of the notorious NKVD (the interior ministry and secret police forever associated with the Purge years) have been infiltrated. Doublethink within doublethink isn’t an awful idea to undermine this self-perpetuating realm of power, yet the young lawyer ought to look over his shoulder…

Loznitsa’s films are always informational and precise, and if some viewers might find the dialogue-driven approach clotted and impenetrable, it certainly creates an aura where you wonder how the film might open up to those even more informed or with living memory of the Soviet Union. And with Loznitsa’s Western European credentials and industry acclaim, it does flatter what audiences from that region probably wish to have confirmed for them about life in the Eastern bloc. Ultimately, “Two Prosecutors”’ is like a perfect 50-50 cocktail of dread and dialogue, the vodka being whichever you’d choose, making the inevitable feel capable of deferment, before it strikes more devastatingly than you’d even think.

Grade: B+

“Two Prosecutors” premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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