Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the Croisette. Two Prosecutors, his first fiction feature since 2018’s Donbass, marks the tenth time the Belarussian-born director has been included in the festival’s lineup. Unfortunately, what could have been a victory lap and a grand return to the main competition — where Loznitsa was last slotted with A Gentle Creature (2017) — turns out to be a disappointing new entry in the director’s otherwise impressive oeuvre. Following last years’ The Invasion, a perfunctory observational documentary on Ukranian life in wartime conditions, Two Prosecutors regretfully sees the auteur with Ukrainian roots sticking to the surface once again. This could indicate that Loznita’s typically formalistic and intellectual rigor is beginning to falter, as the rich source material for Two Prosecutors is definitely not at fault here.
Georgy Demidov’s eponymous novel about the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s is a jarring dissection of authoritarian tyranny. As a survivor of the Soviet Union’s gulag, Demidov managed to capture in detailed writing the nightmarish conditions in the NKVD prisons. The visceral quality of his prose made the state violence against its subjugated people palpable on an extremely textural level. When the young prosecutor Kornev enters such a prison in 1937 to investigate a letter, written by one of its inhabitants with his own blood, you have already tasted the gore that permeates the Stalinist torture chambers.
With his typically restrained tableaux, shot in the academy ratio to emphasize the layers of suppression within this hermetically sealed environment, Loznitsa opts to peek into the prison from a more distanced perspective. Although the muted greys in the low-contrast cinematography by close collaborator Oleg Mutu hint at the jarring conditions, Loznitsa’s skeletal staging rarely captures the profound existential terror of the prisoners, many of them violently coerced into confessing to political crimes they have never committed. Kornev (awkwardly portrayed by Aleksandr Kuznetsov) witnesses their anguish, but the plasticine set design and stilted performances of lead actors and extras alike rarely translates into moments that capture the dire injustice this prosecutor is set out to battle.
Loznitsa doesn’t seem to be so interested in the human condition here, as he rather explores the taxing experience of navigating this labyrinth of state control. In exacting shots that mimic the process-based mise en scène of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), he peels away the many layers of barred gates, security checkpoints, and peepholes that Kornev has to traverse to reach the ill-fated author of the ominous letter. Especially once Kornev reaches Moscow to address the injustices he has seen to his higher-ups, the mind automatically wanders to Kafka. And to this, it has to be said that Loznitsa made a much stronger appeal to the kafkaesque with his earlier A Gentle Creature, in which he convincingly constructed a near-mythical fairytale around a Russian prison town.
In general, Two Prosecutors mostly functions as a stark reminder of Loznitsa’s better work. With his archival documentary The Trial (2018), he already exposed the Stalinist tendencies to subvert the truth. The internalized colonization of the Soviet people found its apotheosis in his masterful State Funeral (2019), in which Stalin’s funeral procession embodies the moral failure of his political project. Loznitsa’s earlier fiction films about moral corruption also all share his typical formal rigidity, but at least those had some ironic playfulness to them that is sorely missed here. Even in moments where Two Prosecutors does aspire to cynical humor — mostly expressed through the dry jokes of the self-satisfied and unperturbed prison warden — the across-the-board subpar performances of all the actors functions to dull any ironic wit. It all amounts to a prevailing sense of pointlessness that looms over our doomed protagonist, as he dutifully heads to his inevitable demise. As in all of his films, Loznitsa is showing us a lot here about the inner workings of the Soviet apparatus, but rarely has he had so little of substance to say.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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