Movie Review: 'Two Prosecutors' is a perfect nightmare of state corruption

Sergei Loznitsa’s “Two Prosecutors” is a nightmare of government corruption so perfectly composed that, by the time it reaches its chilling conclusion, you feel nearly as entrapped as its young protagonist.

Alexander Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is a fresh-faced prosecutor who arrives at the Soviet prison in Bryansk in 1937. This is not, you might be thinking, where anyone new to the job should be in a rush to get to. Yet before even the news of his appointment has reached this penal outpost, Alexander turns up with a note, written in blood, from a prisoner he wishes to speak with.

That this note has reached Alexander is nearly as surprising to the prison warden as Alexander’s unexpected presence in his office. The first scenes of “Two Prosecutors,” where a pile of prisoner letters all attesting to brutality and injustice are burned, only hint at how the note has made its unlikely way to the prosecutor.

This is the height of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, when suspected dissenters and Bolsheviks were rounded up by the NKVD, the secret police, and sent to prison, to the gulag or to death. It was not exactly an opportune time for a young lawyer hardly out of college to stroll into the belly of Stalin’s bureaucratic beast and start asking questions.

Where could such an intriguing idea for a story come from? A prisoner, himself. “Two Prosecutors” is based on a novella by Georgy Demidov, a physician imprisoned for 14 years in Soviet labor camps. He wrote the book in 1969, but it wasn’t published until 2009, posthumously.

Loznitsa, a leading Ukrainian filmmaker, is also not unfamiliar with Russian state violence. The director, who has lived in Berlin since 2001, is best known for stark documentaries about his native country (including 2024’s “The Invasion” and 2014’s “Maiden”) as well as films about Stalinist Russia (2021’s “State Funeral” and 2019’s “The Trial”). The cast also includes several Russian actors, including Kuznetsov, who left their country after speaking out against Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine.

“Two Prosecutors,” which debuted last year in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, is Loznitsa’s first fiction film in seven years. But the sober eye he brings to nonfiction is very much at work in “Two Prosecutors,” a starkly drawn period drama of bleak absurdism.

Beyond any direct lines of connection between past and present, “Two Prosecutors” has the neatness and timelessness of a parable, one that Gogol might have written, and one that could resonate in any era where the naively courageous challenge fascism.

It’s cunningly, even sinisterly structured. In the first half of the film, we follow Alexander’s prolonged entry into the prison. It takes countless series of doors and locks to get through, and each step is watched suspiciously by stone-faced guards. He’s made to wait for hours and urged to reconsider. “Do you know where your predecessor is now?” he’s asked. Every step forward for Alexander into the totalitarian maw is potentially one step further from his own freedom.

When he does finally, stubbornly reach the prisoner, the encounter is equally foreboding. I.S. Stepniak (a tremendous Aleksandr Filippenko) is himself a former prosecutor, a Bolshevik who vividly relates his story and details Stalin’s crackdown. He isn’t seeking personal justice; he wants the truth out. His bruised body is evidence.

Alexander, knowing local officials can’t be trusted, immediately sets out to Moscow to make a report to the chief prosecutor. In the capital, he encounters just as many hallways and barriers to entry as he did in the prison; “Two Prisoners” is composed like a sinister palindrome.

Alexander’s second passage through the layers of totalitarian bureaucracy goes similarly. He manages to get a meeting with the prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), but we long ago knew that Alexander’s whistle blow is sure to fall on deaf ears, and he is unwittingly sealing his own fate. The walls are closing in on him.

“Two Prosecutors,” a Janus Films release in theaters, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Russian and Ukrainian, with subtitles. Running time: 118 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.