Two Prosecutors: A Kafkaesque Journey into Stalin's USSR
Sergei Loznitsa constructs a chilling and petrifying portrait, without escape, of Stalin’s terror.
Winner of the 32nd European Film Festival Palić, Two Prosecutors is a kind of Kafkaesque labyrinth, depicting the concentration camp world of the Stalinist terror. Its director, Sergei Loznitsa, primarily works as a documentary filmmaker, always exploring History, particularly that of the post-Soviet era, with profound aesthetic and ethical rigor. He approaches documentary with the compelling method of fiction, and fiction with the attention to realistic detail of documentary.
Two Prosecutors is based on a story by physicist and writer Georgy Demidov, who was arrested in 1938 on suspicion of counterrevolutionary activity. He then spent fourteen years in a gulag, a story he began to recount many years later, though it was published posthumously starting from 2008.
Two Prosecutors is set in the Soviet Union in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s terror, the so-called Great Purges. In the frigid Bryansk prison, human remnants move like ghosts: inmates arrested for unspecified anti-revolutionary and anti-socialist crimes. One of the prisoners is tasked with incinerating the thousands of pleas and denunciations addressed to Comrade Stalin. One of these, written in a prisoner’s blood, miraculously reaches the new young prosecutor, Alexander Kornev, who decides to do his duty, answering that desperate plea. Kornev arranges to listen to the man, beginning to navigate the labyrinthine Soviet concentration camp, made up of a thousand denials, waits, metaphorical and physical prison doors that open and close behind him.
The prosecutor is an upright and idealistic Bolshevik who, thanks to his position, practicing the art of patience, manages, after much pressure, to meet Stepniak, a former party leader he once listened to and admired, in his Law school, speaking of the “Great Bolshevik Truth.” Now he is reduced to a shapeless mass of skin and aching bones, subjected to the abuse and torture of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs: a political police apparatus for state security that controls prisons and gulags, where it sent millions of people, convicted after summary trials and confessions extracted under torture.
Determined to reveal this state of affairs to the highest levels, Kornev immediately sets out to report the situation to the Moscow Prosecutor General, whom he meets after further physical (the palace) and Kafkaesque mental constructions. He moves with diligence and determination within a pervasive bureaucratic system that seemingly indulges him, but is, in reality, slowly and inexorably enveloping him in its machinery of terror. What betrays the protagonist is the illusion, the hope, that there might still be a possibility of justice, in a system—as we will later learn from History—that, instead, offered no escape route.
Two Prosecutors has a perfect circular structure, opening and closing with the prison doors swinging open to swallow up its new victims. A sardonically and horrifyingly Kafkaesque staging, likely also echoed by the protagonist’s initial, K. It conveys a distant yet penetrating literary quality, reminiscent of some George Orwellian dystopia. A story that begins as a morality tale, about the absurdity of a claustrophobic bureaucratic system, which, however, has its own tradition, even allegorical, in Russia, in the pages of Nikolai Gogol. In Two Prosecutors, bureaucracy becomes the prelude to the concentration camp-like universe of prisons, where human life is humiliated and obliterated. An alienating journey through ridiculous rites and infernal mechanisms, perfectly exemplified in the only two places where the film is set: the prison and the palace (in between two brief interludes of train journeys, in which the protagonist encounters indecipherable characters).
Two Prosecutors accumulates a tremendous anxiety-inducing quality as it moves through a malignant and inhuman bureaucracy, which protects and ruthlessly replicates itself, condemning anyone who dares to challenge it, causing them to physically lose themselves in a labyrinth of corridors, antechambers, stairways, bedrooms and halls inhabited by dead souls, but filled with perfidy.
Two Prosecutors is a film with surgical precision in depicting a world that is more than just History. Rigorously and geometrically theatrical in its cinematic approach, the film conveys the human desolation of a totalitarian system, even an absurd one, thanks to Sergei Loznitsa’s relentless eye. There are, and cannot be, any dramatic twists in Two Prosecutors. The inexorable and predictable conclusion of the story finds its suspense in the wait for the concentration camp mechanism to close in on the protagonist’s unrealistic attempts. The film’s strength lies in the details, in the compositional fabric of the work. In the paranoia that emanates from the austerity of the director’s staging.
Two Prosecutors is impeccably directed, capturing the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Stalinist regime. The relentless editing, composed of fixed shots and enclosed spaces, features dull, cold colors, reminiscent of that world, which also reflect the pallor of the protagonists’ faces. The pictorial quality, undeniably faithful to the era, is provided by the great cinematographer Oleg Mutu, perfectly complemented by the classical and chilling soundtrack by Christiaan Verbeek.
Another strength of Two Prosecutors is the acting. Not just the solid performance of protagonist Alexander Kuznetsov, but of all the characters he encounters in the film, a gallery of arrogant servants of power, over-the-top executioners like those in prison, or icy bureaucrats, fueled by a system capable of reaching anywhere and breaking anyone.
Two Prosecutors is a gripping, chilling, and Mephistophelian example of art, a microphysics not only of power, but of tyranny, a warning from History, which makes us shudder at something familiar, as when the prisoner stripped of all rights laments that world in which “competent people have been replaced by ignorant charlatans,” obsequious to a power that drags everyone ever deeper into the depths.
In the end, Sergei Loznitsa magnificently overcomes his challenge: a cinema so rigorous and formally controlled in every aspect that it perfectly evokes and conveys the atmosphere of an inhuman and totalitarian regime.
Davide Magnisi
©FIPRESCI 2025