What with Russia’s gangsterish siege of Ukraine, the Trump administration’s shady acquiescence to it, and the concurrent worldwide slide toward neo-fascist amorality and tech-poisoned semi-literacy, there may not be a more urgent filmmaking presence in the churn today than Sergei Loznitsa. In a wide-awake Ukrainian/post-Soviet career that began in the mid-’90s, Loznitsa has built a hyperactive corpus of historical and moral rectitude that could shame any other socially serious artist, with dozens of films of all shapes and sizes, coming two or more a year. He has largely toggled between three modes: orthodox you-are-there docs (like 2014’s Maidan and the 2024 epic The Invasion, opening March 21 at Metrograph); thorny and elliptical arthouse fictions (beginning with 2010’s My Joy); and scalding found-footage reproofs of Soviet life comprised entirely of state-created imagery (the last of these we saw were 2019’s State Funeral and 2021’s Babi Yar. Context). Now outside of Ukraine (his production company is headquartered in the Netherlands), Loznitsa stands as perhaps the 21st century’s most imperative — and unimpeachable — political movie voice.
Loznitsa’s new film, Two Prosecutors, changes tracks — it’s a careful, studied, almost satirical historical fiction shot in Lithuania and set during Stalin’s Great Purge of the ’30s. Also unusually, it’s adapted from an old-school fictional source, a story by Georgy Demidov, a Russian physicist who was arrested in 1938 and sent to the Gulag for 18 years, and whose sardonic stories, sourced out of that period, were only published decades after his death. So, like every one of Loznitsa’s films, this one has a correctional function, politically speaking — it’s not merely exploring the history but reconstituting and honoring a little-known Purge victim, and, as always, if Loznitsa doesn’t do it, who will?
Loznitsa doesn’t shock us with atrocity, he suffocates us with corrupt officialism.
We’re plunked down in the color-deprived squalor of a primitive prison under construction in Bryansk (filmed in an old under-deconstruction Soviet building in Riga), where a phlegmy old inmate is ordered to burn a sack of prisoners’ notes. He bothers to read a few of the pleas, and then, we never know why, pockets one that requests a visit from the region’s prosecutor, so secret testimony can be given. Somehow, the note gets out into the world, and the next thing these dour Stalinist functionaries know, a young and naive prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksander Kuznetsov), shows up, gently demanding an audience with the political prisoner who wrote it.
And so the wide-eyed baby Bolshevik (who nonetheless sports Kuznetsov’s actual nose, the most alarmingly dorsum-crushed schnoz in modern movies) begins his journey through the endless maze of Soviet bureaucratic obscuration, misdirection, and stonewalling. Loznitsa leans into this Kafkatopia with an overbearing formal rigor — stuffed with looming master shots that never move, the movie is a giant pregnant pause, every confrontation thick with blank-faced indolence and unspoken menace. Kornyev’s odyssey is so systematically reduced to long hallways, locked doors, infinite stairwells, silent waiting rooms, and stultifying security rituals that the sludgy physical weight of the film becomes nearly farcical, in ways that Demidov’s original story (which hasn’t been translated) couldn’t have mustered merely with prose. At times, it approaches the baleful, depressed comedy of Kaurismaki, if that Finnish auteur ever went political/historical. Loznitsa doesn’t shock us with atrocity, he suffocates us with corrupt officialism, and the 15th time a brick-faced guard reluctantly unlocks a massive iron door might squeeze an unhappy chuckle out of you.
It’s not long before we begin worrying about how this quietly insistent newbie will get himself into Purge-able trouble, but eventually Kornyev does get to the note writer (Aleksandr Filippenko), a grizzled old Bolshy who divulges to the stunned prosecutor what we already know: the Purge is happening, Stalin’s secret police (the NKVD) is torturing, forcing confessions, and disappearing political dissidents, etc. (The characterization of local governments being cleansed of “knowledgeable experts” and replaced with “ignorant charlatans” sounds like Loznitsa is eyeballing Trump as well as Putin, but maybe not; stocking government with loyalist stooges has always been Autocracy 101.) The old true-believer thinks Stalin and the Politburo are being deceived by these local thugs, and that it is Kornyev’s duty to go to Moscow and tell them the truth. The slope steepens.
If you’re even vaguely familiar with Soviet history, Two Prosecutors offers no twists or payloads — the methodical machine of it reflects the way the society worked. What we do know hovers over the film like a sick fog; we can guess what’s coming, and Loznitsa knows we can, and so the film’s thrust is indeed Kafkaesque, immersing us in this futile quest for the sake of the bad-dreaminess of it while maintaining a colorless historical accuracy. (There’s even a burbling Gogol monologue by an old man on a train, also played by Filippenko, that’s lifted from Dead Souls and updated to involve Lenin.) The movie is not ultimately Loznitsa’s most challenging, nor his most thoroughly weaponized, but that’s a high bar — instead, place it beside the trivia otherwise eating up screen time this spring, and watch it bristle. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
