Typically, you’d say that people are haunted by things from the past. But Sergei Loznitsa is a director whose films are often set in the past but haunted by the present.
That has everything to do with the fact that Loznitsa was born in Belarus but raised in Ukraine. Whether his films are blackly comic or stark and sobering, the director often makes movies about Russia’s past that are infused with a fury over what Russia is doing today in his homeland.
“Two Prosecutors,” which opened in the main competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is Loznitsa’s first narrative film since 2018’s wrenching dark comedy “Donbass,” which presented absurdist scenes from early in the Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine. Since then, he’s focused on nonfiction films like “State Funeral,” “Babi Yar. Context” and “The Invasion,” the latter two of which premiered in Cannes. But where his documentaries are typically rigorous and restrained, letting the audience make the necessary connections, “Two Prosecutors” is a quietly horrifying descent into a Kafkaesque nightmare where trying to do the right thing might just be the riskiest choice of all.
The film is based on a story by Georgy Demidov, a writer and physicist who was himself imprisoned in Soviet labor camps for 18 years after his arrest during Stalin’s “Great Purge” in 1938. His experiences no doubt went into the book and the film, which is set in 1937 – or, as it reminds us in an onscreen title, “THE HEIGHT OF STALIN’S TERROR.” Its lead character is Kornyev, a recent graduate who’s been newly appointed the job of prosecutor, and who receives a letter from an inmate claiming that he’s been falsely imprisoned by NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. He goes to the prison, a decaying fortress where you can’t walk down a hallway without encountering another rusting, padlocked metal door.
Kornyev gets the runaround at the prison but eventually sees the inmate, who tells him plenty about the corruption and torture inside the walls. That sends the prosecutor to Moscow to look into it further, where he gets the runaround and then some.
In some ways, “Two Prosecutors” is nearly as formally rigorous as Loznitsa’s nonfiction work. It doesn’t use a musical score and lets conversations play out at length, with minimal editing. The camera sets up, usually at a distance, and frames the action without camera moves or zooms. The film isn’t in black and white, but it’s something worse: color drained of all vibrancy, leaving compositions in shades of rusted reds and frigid browns and grays.
As in his docs, Loznitsa positions himself and the audience as observers, and he knows what we’ll notice and what connections we’ll make as we watch the methodically surreal machineries of injustice turn. There’s little of the black humor of “Donbass” here, but it feels every bit as timely. When the prisoner gives Kornyev the rundown on life in the prison, his chilling monologue – the final thoughts of an old, beaten man, laying out the depths of corruption in a gravelly whisper to the only person who will listen – includes an aside about how honest, knowledgeable public servants have been replaced by ignorant charlatans, a line set 88 years ago and written and filmed before Donald Trump named his cabinet.
Loznitsa’s film is driven by the urgency of today’s events, although it does so in measured beats. You could say that “Two Prosecutors” is implacably infuriating, quietly shining a light on the gears of totalitarianism that designed to grind up anyone they designate an enemy of the state – i.e., anybody who might challenge, embarrass or slightly hinder the people who have power at that particular moment.
The film moves slowly but relentlessly, with each new moment showing just how dangerous the lead character’s idealism really is. You don’t need to know Russian history to know where it’s going, but Loznitsa stops short of letting the story play out to its logical conclusion; instead, he slams a door (literally and figuratively) and we know exactly what comes next.
The director has said he makes films to highlight Russia’s slide toward Stalinism, and “Two Prosecutors” does that without making a point of how it’s doing it. Early in the film, a prison director says that Kornyev shouldn’t see the prisoner right away because, he explains, “We’re living in troubled times, as I’m sure you know.”
We’re living in troubled times now, too. And you could say that films like “Two Prosecutors” help us understand that.
