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Innocent people nabbed from their homes and imprisoned under false pretences. Terror-driven interrogation methods employed to secure phoney confessions. Revolting, filth-caked jail cells that wouldn\u2019t be fit for your grandma\u2019s old stink hound, let alone a prize academic. Sweeping, instant punishment for anyone who does not tow the party line. No, not America in 2025, but Russia in 1937 at the height of Stalin\u2019s voracious and sweeping purges \u2013 his attempt to cauterize what he considered to be the festering wound of opposition.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa\u2019s new paranoiac drama is adapted from a novella by Georgy Demidov, a Russian physicist who was forced to work in a Siberian gulag for much of Stalin\u2019s reign. It follows an angelic young prosecutor named Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who responds to a note he receives on a folded piece of cardboard and penned in blood that contains a plea for help from a man who once lectured him at University.<\/p>\n
Sincerely believing that his slightly elevated status will allow him to walk between the raindrops of the ever-watchful secret police, he takes his hat, coat and briefcase and manages to talk his way into the cell of his old charge Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), on his last leg from ritual beatings and humilations. Loznitsa prolongs the journey from entrance to cell, as Kornyev is glanced top-to-toe by various guards and overseers, many of whom seem quite amused at his bald-faced moxie. <\/p>\n
Kornyev, meanwhile, never once raises his voice or does anything that could be considered openly challenging, and so he\u2019s eventually awarded his visitation. And yet it\u2019s clear from the off that it\u2019s unlikely that he will come out of this situation with his righteous sense of morality allowed to operate in public spaces. He sincerely believes that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that\u2019s all very well until someone attacks you with with a massive sword.<\/p>\n
Loznitsa\u2019s lackadaisical film comprises three intimate set pieces based around extended and poetically-literate dialogue scenes. In between these moments, we see shots of Kornyev waiting and often dozing off. He fights with patience against this unseen foe, yet his naivety is all too conspicuous when it comes to believing for even a second that he might succeed in his well-meaning odyssey against the all-encompassing power structure.<\/p>\n
Two Prosecutors offers a fairly standard critique of the bureaucratic superstate in which there is always someone a few steps ahead ready to stomp you under its boot heel. Shot in the oppressively boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio, the film is beautifully framed, blocked and edited, with editor Danielius Kokanauskis in particular locating a series of hypnotic, pendulum-like rhythms in the extended conversation sequences.<\/p>\n
Yet as serious and prescient as the film may be politically, it feels too much like a quaint variation on a story that\u2019s been told many times before (not least by Loznitsa himself!), all likely herded under the clich\u00e9d thematic banner of \u201cKafkaesque\u201d. It\u2019s a supremely well-made piece of work whose function and message never quite manage to transcend the prosaic. Still, in the strange times we\u2019re currently living through, maybe it\u2019s worth sounding that necessary siren one more time for luck.<\/p>\n
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