Innocent people nabbed from their homes and imprisoned under false pretences. Terror-driven interrogation methods employed to secure phoney confessions. Revolting, filth-caked jail cells that wouldn’t be fit for your grandma’s old stink hound, let alone a prize academic. Sweeping, instant punishment for anyone who does not tow the party line. No, not America in 2026, but Russia in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s voracious and sweeping purges – his attempt to cauterize what he considered to be the festering wound of opposition.
Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new paranoiac drama is adapted from a novella by Georgy Demidov, a Russian physicist who was forced to work in a Siberian gulag for much of Stalin’s reign. It follows an angelic young prosecutor named Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who responds to a note he receives on a folded piece of cardboard and penned in blood that contains a plea for help from a man who once lectured him at University.
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Sincerely believing that his slightly elevated status will allow him to walk between the raindrops of the ever-watchful secret police, he takes his hat, coat and briefcase and manages to talk his way into the cell of his old charge Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), on his last leg from ritual beatings and humilations. Loznitsa prolongs the journey from entrance to cell, as Kornyev is glanced top-to-toe by various guards and overseers, many of whom seem quite amused at his bald-faced moxie.
Kornyev, meanwhile, never once raises his voice or does anything that could be considered openly challenging, and so he’s eventually awarded his visitation. And yet it’s clear from the off that it’s unlikely that he will come out of this situation with his righteous sense of morality allowed to operate in public spaces. He sincerely believes that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that’s all very well until someone attacks you with with a massive sword.
Loznitsa’s lackadaisical film comprises three intimate set pieces based around extended and poetically-literate dialogue scenes. In between these moments, we see shots of Kornyev waiting and often dozing off. He fights with patience against this unseen foe, yet his naivety is all too conspicuous when it comes to believing for even a second that he might succeed in his well-meaning odyssey against the all-encompassing power structure.
Two Prosecutors offers a fairly standard critique of the bureaucratic superstate in which there is always someone a few steps ahead ready to stomp you under its boot heel. Shot in the oppressively boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio, the film is beautifully framed, blocked and edited, with editor Danielius Kokanauskis in particular locating a series of hypnotic, pendulum-like rhythms in the extended conversation sequences.
Yet as serious and prescient as the film may be politically, it feels too much like a quaint variation on a story that’s been told many times before (not least by Loznitsa himself!), all likely herded under the clichéd thematic banner of “Kafkaesque”. It’s a supremely well-made piece of work whose function and message never quite manage to transcend the prosaic. Still, in the strange times we’re currently living through, maybe it’s worth sounding that necessary siren one more time for luck.
