The opening gate that ushers us into Sergei Loznitsa‘s superbly poised, pitch-black “Two Prosecutors” is the kind of enormous, scarred metal gate behind which nothing good ever happens. It is the Soviet Union in 1937 and so, as a title informs us briskly, “the height of Stalin’s terror.” It is no spoiler to say that later, this implacable gate will open a second time, before closing with the finality of a curtain falling on a historical tragedy that, to repurpose Marx’s famous dictum, is repeating itself all around us right now, this time as grotesquely unfunny farce.
The immense steel door is the entryway to a prison, a dismal setting saved from dourness by the pictorial quality of Oleg Mutu’s pristine, locked-off, Academy-ratio cinematography, not to mention by Christiaan Verbeek’s terrific classical score. While hatchet-faced guards bark orders in the scaffolded courtyard — a masterful bit of production design from Jurij Grigorovič and Aldis Meinerts in which the rickety wooden backdrop looks like a gigantic tic-tac-toe with every square an X — an almost comical, pompous trumpet parps and gives the whole minutely choreographed image a touch of Jacques Tati.
Teams of shuffling, malnourished inmates are being assigned to carry out some of the menial drudgework involved in propping up a corrupt and paranoid state. One such task, burning a huge mound of unopened petitions from the Party faithful to “Dear Comrade Stalin,” falls to an old man incarcerated on some slim pretext, who is shoved into a room equipped with a small stove and given a single match. The desaturated palette, the man’s pallor, the shaft of cold light in which he sits — the shot could be a classical painting of Methuselah or Moses, and the heroically beautiful framing of this unheroic and ugly act is a perfect sampler of the ironic tone Loznitsa maintains by the caustic deployment of form against content.
Although he’s been cautioned to destroy every single message, the old man purloins one of them: a scrap of card with a few scrawled words on it which he tucks into his overshirt. Something about this one note prompted even this pitiful creature to a risky gesture of mercy. Perhaps it’s because it was written in blood. As statistically improbable as this tiny act of resistance is, an even more unlikely, unseen chain of events then occurs by which the note actually reaches the local prosecutor, Kornyev (played by should-be-breakout Aleksandr Kuznetsov, giving a rivetingly eloquent performance despite its few words). With his boxer’s profile and direct, incredulous stare, Kornyev is a new appointee, youthful, smart and principled, and completely unprepared for how little the system he ardently believes in cares for those qualities.
Kornyev visits the prison and over the irritated demurrals and delaying tactics of the prison authorities (a lot of “Two Prosecutors” consists of Kornyev waiting, seated on a succession of hard–backed chairs), he insists on seeing Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), the inmate who wrote the note. Stepniak, whom Kornyev recognizes as a once-esteemed thinker who spoke at his law school jubilee on the topic of “The Great Bolshevik Truth,” tells his tale of maltreatment and injustice at the hands of the local NKVD (secret police) and Kornyev resolves to take the case all the way to Moscow. There, at the top of a seemingly never-ending staircase in a monumental municipal building, his distant superior, the blank-faced bureaucrat Vyshynsky (Anatoli Beliy), occupies an enormous office and takes short, ruthless meetings with supplicants according to a strictly enforced schedule.
Based on a book by Georgy Demidov that was written in 1969 but only published in 2009, the story is not driven forward by any particular sense of suspense — although, playing in 2025, there may be moments where one registers the shock of the familiar, as when one character rails against a culture in which “experts are replaced by ignorant charlatans.” Otherwise, there are few surprises in store for how things will play out for our increasingly hapless hero, when historical hindsight means we all know so much more than Kornyev does, and when even the most throwaway moment comes dusted in Loznitsa’s trademark cynicism.
But this is not the kind of movie that hinges on abrupt reveals or gratuitous twists. Indeed, the banal predictability of Kornyev’s slowly mounting humiliations and disillusionments is very much the point. The film’s fascination lies in its fabric, the devastation in its detail, from the speed with which a fallen body is removed from the prison yard as if it had never been there to the way we catch Kornyev jumping fractionally when a buzzer sounds.
Loznitsa’s legacy as an important and hugely influential documentarian is assured, but his last two fiction features — 2017’s “A Gentle Creature,” a slightly unsatisfying exercise in social surrealism, and 2018’s “Donbass,” a more assaultive black comedy — were less solidly received. In “Two Prosecutors,” perhaps out of deference to the source text, Loznitsa plays it straighter than in either of those titles and the result is much stronger for it, as though he has met some self-set challenge to see how efficiently a rigorously formal aesthetic can evoke the pervading, dehumanizing horrors of living under totalitarian control. It gives the experience of watching “Two Prosectors” an almost tactile literariness, like reading a slim paperback classic by Camus or Kafka or Orwell, where the pages are spotted with age, but the insights remain painfully, vividly fresh.
