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Two Prosecutors
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How safe was it to be a whistleblower in the Stalinist Russia of 1937? Acclaimed Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, 2010) explores this question through the figure of young, idealistic prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who, almost miraculously, receives a plea for justice from an elderly, savagely injured prisoner, ‘Old Bolshevik’ Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko). Just how did the elderly man’s blood-scrawled message (on the sole of a shoe!) make its way under the eyes of a kindly, benevolent administrator? As viewers, we’ll never know – but we trust that stranger things surely happened on the sides of both oppressors and resistants. As yet untouched by systemic corruption, Kornyev investigates the case with dogged determination – and no small amount of political naïveté. Will he ever be allowed to even present his findings to the Procurator General, Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy)? And if he does succeed in that heroic quest, then what? What Kornyev gradually uncovers is a vast network of corruption under Stalin, whereby the NKVD (secret police) has systematically arrested, tortured and silenced the previous, more benevolent wave of Old Bolsheviks. At every step, Kornyev’s investigation faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Rigorously stylised in its visual language – the camera does not move even once in almost two hours – this is an unrelenting portrait of brutal social control. Loznitsa makes the most of reiterated movements of passage through a seemingly endless succession of institutional doors, gateways and corridors. His careful mise en scène relies on the forward displacement or backward recession of figures in hyper-severe, enclosed, architecturally gloom-laden rooms. The sound design matches the visual schema: there is almost no music of any kind, only a cluster of distant voices and wails – a little reminiscent, in this regard, of The Zone of Interest (2023). The film is based on a novella by Georgy Demidov, who was himself a political prisoner for 18 years. Yet it is not without black touches of gallows humour. Ultimately, the two prosecutors of the title may refer to Kornyev and his climactic, face-to-face encounter with the elusive Vyshinsky … or perhaps, at a certain point. everybody in this milieu has become either a self-styled prosecutor or a hapless victim. As in a Miklós Jancsó movie like The Red and the White (1967), such social-subject positions can change places with frightening rapidity in a time and place like this. Two Prosecutors is a bleak but absorbing film which earns its suffocating atmosphere and sustained mood of darkness. Its conclusion will have some viewers cross-associating to a more contemporary tale of Russian life, Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025), which also hinges on matters of investigation, revelation and reprisal. (Relief note for anyone worrying about Two Prosecutors’ ‘official’ title being in German, due to its main financing source: the language spoken is authentically Russian and Ukrainian – unlike the clumsy English idiom adopted, for reasons of international co-production expediency, by Wizard.) But there can be no doubt that Loznitsa’s is the better and more expressive work. © Adrian Martin 6 October 2025 |
