Two Prosecutors

‘If liberty means anything at all,’ George Orwell once wrote, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. What happens, though, if you try to tell people what they don’t want to hear in an illiberal society? Judging by this unblinking, engrossing film, absolutely nothing good. 

It’s 1938 and Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a wet-behind-the-ears young prosecutor in the provincial Russian city of Bryansk, has received a letter from an inmate at the local prison. Worryingly, it’s scrawled in blood on a scrap of paper. The idealistic law graduate announces himself at the rusted iron gates of this rotting grey edifice to hear what the man has to say. 

The hearty prison warden and governor, superficially helpful, eventually allow him into the cell of a bruised and battered old prisoner called Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko). The man, a veteran Bolshevik, believes his abuse is a sign of rogue elements within the NKVD security forces. Why else would a dogged old loyalist like him have been beaten half to death? What neither man understands is that this is a feature not a bug of Stalin’s Russia. He is just another victim of the Great Purge.

It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (In the Fog) adapts dissident writer Georgy Demidov’s novella into a collision of idealism and cold reality, as Kornyev takes the case to Moscow and sticks his head deeper into the lion’s mouth. Demidov knew of what he wrote – he spent 14 years in a Siberian gulag – and Kornyev’s journey reflects those experiences. With each well-intentioned wrong turn, he moves deeper into the maze.

This immaculately constructed world, in which even loyalists are declared enemies of the state, offers some parallels with the current ideological moment. But they’re lightly worn in a film that, like a graver companion piece to The Death of Stalin, focuses on the Kafkaesque aspects of political repression. When Filippenko reappears as a one-legged Great War veteran in Kornyev’s train carriage with a tale of Lenin’s generosity, it’s either a ghostly wink from a more idealistic past or a cruel joke on the courageous but naive lawyer. 

A slow cinema treat, Two Prosecutors rewards patience, with endless waiting rooms and antechambers both a limbo state and a last-chance saloon for Kornyev. It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work. 

In New York theaters on Fri Mar 20. Out in the UK and Ireland Mar 27.