Film Review: Two Prosecutors Chases The Truth In The Stalinist Shadows

The Scoop TWO PROSECUTORS by Sergei Loznitsa

To the slightly absurd and melancholic soundtrack of trombone and trumpet (from composer Christiaan Verbeek), another day of endless days begins as the latest work gang of prisoners shuffle into a courtyard.

Clutching their belts in a forlorn effort to keep their pants hitched on bent, emaciated bodies, they are yet more victims of Stalin’s purges. An old man carrying a bulging sack is directed to a cell, bare but for a window and a stove. He is directed to burn the sack’s contents – hundreds of letters, desperate pleas to Stalin for clemency for unknown ‘crimes.’

One of these letters, written in blood, finds its way to newly appointed prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov). Kornyev is young, fresh out of law school, idealistic, determined, and brave. But in Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1937, these qualities make him far too credulous. This is not going to end well.

So begins Two Prosecutors, the latest film from director Sergei Loznitsa, adapted from Georgy Demidov’s 1969 novella, written about his experience of the Gulags.

The film hints at Kafka and Orwell in its examination of malign bureaucracy, while in a comic interlude, also pays direct homage to Gogol’s Dead Souls.

As Loznitsa describes it, within the tragedy, ‘there is always a place for the grotesque, and for farce.’ And it is this black humour that prevents the film from becoming a bleak treatise on, not so much the banality of evil (though that is clearly present), as how State-induced paranoia and institutionalised repression become the quotidian norm.

Indeed, the film is always fascinating, frequently poignant and occasionally, disconcertingly beautiful.

Two Prosecutors is largely dialogue-driven, though almost every conversation is to be understood on two levels. Kornyev is warned by the prison governor (Vytautas Kaniušonis) against seeing the inmate who wrote the letter – Stepniak (a wonderfully stoic Alexander Filippenko) – because of the risk of infection.

However, the infection is implicitly understood to be political rather than merely physical. Outwaiting the governor (there is a lot of waiting that emphasises both bureaucratic inertia and its power), Kornyev finally gets to see Stepniak, who reveals the brutalism of the NKVD (now the FSB), Stalin’s security service, which is systematically incarcerating and executing Stalin’s former Bolshevik colleagues.

Paranoia eats its own. Recognising a like-minded idealist, the meeting sets in motion a hero’s journey. But to where?

Kornyev fails to see, or deliberately ignores, any number of warning signs as he pursues Stepniak’s cause right to the top (literally, as he slowly winds his way up a seemingly endless staircase).

Through patience and determination, he gains an audience with the Procurator General, Vyshinsky (Anatoli Beliy). It’s here that Two Prosecutors dramatic irony bites sharpest.

The historical Vyshinsky was an obsequious and enthusiastic judicial implementer of Stalin’s purges, and Beliy’s fictional version here alludes to that, seated beneath a looming life-size bust of Stalin. This scene is typical of the film’s use of a static camera and meticulously framed shots where detail is important.

Loznitsa creates visual metaphors of the endless layers of bureaucracy in government and prison that exist to insulate the decision makers from the consequences of their actions and to repress those who dare to challenge the system.

Witness the labyrinth of corridors and locked doors that define movement within the prison. Everything has its choreographed function; nothing is rushed, and to step out of line is to invite punishment.

Accompanied by sounds of locks opening, footsteps echoing, doors slamming shut, director Loznitsa doesn’t hurry either; his pace is carefully calibrated. Likewise, the cinematography from long-time collaborator Oleg Mutu has a stillness and undeniable austere beauty that contraposes narrative and form.

Employing a washed-out palette that suggests the soul-leaching existence under Stalin’s dictatorship, Two Prosecutors has a period verisimilitude enhanced by its use of academy ratio, location-shooting in a 1905-built Latvian prison and costumes from Dorota Roqueplo sewn from vintage 1930s fabric.

You can see the art behind every decision in this film and its transposition on to screen.

If the film has a minor flaw, it is whether such a character as Kornyev, fresh from law school, would be so ignorant of the political situation that he would trust anyone in power. Nevertheless, Kuznetsov does a fine job, his wordless eloquence imbuing Kornyev with patient resolve and a decency that keeps the audience constantly fearful of his fate.

The audience knows the consequences of questioning an authoritarian regime, and Loznitsa’s screenplay ratchets up the dramatic irony at every encounter, so that the end, when it comes, is inevitably banal.

Two Prosecutors is not merely a historical appraisal. Today, as our democratic institutions are suborned by authoritarian narcissists and CEOs supplicate themselves to wannabe dictators, Loznitsa’s mightily impressive film is devastatingly relevant.

Two Prosecutors opens at select cinemas nationally on 13 November 2025. Session times can be found at the website below.

Website: https://sharmillfilms.com.au/feature-film/two-prosecutors/

Socials: https://www.instagram.com/sharmillfilms/

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