Sergei Loznitsa’s forensically objective, intellectually nuanced documentaries tend to stand in stark contrast to his fictional output; in films like My Joy, In the Fog and Donbass, the Ukrainian director is inclined to put his cards on the table, usually addressing his signature subject: the abject failure of the Russian state. Two Prosecutors follows in that tradition, being a very slow and very talky chamber piece that could be the most terrifying comedy that Aki Kaurismäki never made, or a Chaplin-esque horror film about the evils of bureaucracy in a world ruled by morons. This time, Loznitsa doesn’t just have the Kremlin in his sights; Two Prosecutors is one of his most accessible films to date, with relevance to every country wrestling with authoritarian political parties right now.
Based on a novella by Soviet and political activist Georgy Demidov (1908-1987), Two Prosecutors begins with a screen credit noting the year as 1937 (“The height of Stalin’s terror”). A prison door opens, and a procession of broken men file out into the yard. “This is your work gang,” a warden tells his colleague. “What a fine bunch,” is the sarcastic reply. One especially old, dishevelled man is singled out for special duties; his job is to sit by a stove in an empty cell, incinerating a huge pile of folded papers. It transpires that they are letters, written to the dear leader by men being held illegally, having been forced to confess to imaginary crimes by NKVD, the USSR’s secret service. He will never read them.
The old man is warned of dire consequences should he give any of the letters a reprieve. Nevertheless, he tucks one away, a missive written in blood and addressed to the Bryansk Prosecutor’s Office. Somehow, it gets to its intended destination, and sometime after that, the first of the two prosecutors — a recent graduate called Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov)—arrives at the prison asking to see the governor. Instead, he gets his deputy, who tries to fob him off with the Russian equivalent of “he’s in a meeting.” But Kornyev insists, demanding access to a prisoner named Stepniak.
The deputy goes to see the governor, who is lounging in his office on a leather sofa. “Some student has turned up,” he says, and the two make plans to leave him hanging around in the deputy’s office, hoping he’ll just get bored and go. But Kornyev does not go, so the governor tells him that Stepniak has a contagious disease, reeling off a list of terrible diseases that are doing the rounds, like typhoid, diphtheria and much, much worse. Kornyev is undeterred, so the governor allows his request, albeit with a sinister warning. “Washing your hands with soap won’t save you from certain infections,” he says, an innocent enough line just dripping with barely concealed violence.
‘Two Prosecutors’
SBS International
Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) is in solitary confinement, and reveals to Kornyev what’s going on in the prison. Lifting up his clothing, he reveals weeping red welts and purple lesions all over his body (“That’s how things are, laddy… My urine is red.”). Stepniak explains that the Soviet secret service, the NKVD, has infiltrated local government and are busily installing a kakistocracy, targeting older party members and taking them out with especially harsh punishments. Kornyev, a fine, upstanding Communist, is shocked at this contempt for the law of his land, and gets a train back to the city, where he demands an urgent meeting with the Prosecutor General.
The pace is painfully methodical, as Kornyev faces obstruction and obfuscation at every level, enduring Kafka-esque levels of red tape before the Prosecutor General will even agree to see him. What separates this from, say, a Roy Andersson movie is the creeping sense of Parallax View-style menace that sets in; there’s a sense that Kornyev is getting in over his head, never quite reading the room and making enemies that are each cumulatively more dangerous than the last. The set design is terrific in this regard; statues of Lenin and Stalin watch over airless, wood-paneled rooms bathed in a passive-aggressive Soviet glaze of green.
In previous years, this might have seemed like more of a very local, and, culturally, very specific story, more of a cautionary tale about what might happen to us in the West if our democracies are not protected. It used to be a case of there but for the grace of God…, but in 2025, life is coming at all of us hard and fast. Two Prosecutors is a bleak warning from history, one that will only seem more and more prophetic with the passing of time — and that time starts now.
Title: Two Prosecutors
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Screenwriter: Sergei Loznitsa, based on the novella Two Prosecutors by Georgy Demidov
Cast: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy
Sales company: SBS International
Running time: 1 hr 53 mins
