‘Two Prosecutors’ Review: A Kafkaesque Journey Into Stalinist Terror

Spare and unsentimental, stretched across two hours yet built from a surprisingly small number of scenes and characters, Two Prosecutors plays like a Kafkaesque legal odyssey set in the Soviet hinterland. Its protagonist is a young, idealistic provincial prosecutor who decides to look into a troubling case at a local prison after hearing whispers of abuse at the hands of the secret police. The year is 1937—the very moment the film’s opening intertitle bluntly labels “the peak of Stalinist terror.”

Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian filmmaker best known and most acclaimed for his documentaries, has long struggled to replicate the stark force of his non-fiction work in his narrative films. Until now, his fiction features have tended toward heavy-handedness and chaotic satire, with none of the grave, rigorous clarity of Maidan, The Event or State Funeral. Two Prosecutors, however, feels cut from the same cloth as those documentaries—not only in its political bite, but in the organic, unforced way it gets there, relying on cinematic tools that are straightforward, even conventional, but impeccably chosen.

The film is based on a book by Georgy Demidov, written in 1969 but only published in 2009. It begins with an elderly inmate in a high-security prison tasked with burning the countless petitions addressed to Joseph Stalin—letters begging the leader to intervene in their cases. One card stops him cold. Instead of tossing it into the small furnace, he pockets it. Written in blood on a scrap of cardboard, it somehow makes its way out of the prison and into the hands of Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a freshly minted provincial prosecutor who promptly heads to the prison to hear the testimony of the man who wrote it.

The prison officials and the local NKVD—the Soviet secret police—do everything they can to obstruct, delay and ultimately prevent Kornyev from meeting the inmate. But despite the veiled threats, the bureaucratic excuses and the hostile stares, he persists. Eventually he reaches the frail, nearly defeated old man, listens to his account of beatings and torture, sees the marks on his body, and—under the gaze of dozens of men who very much wish he weren’t there—carries the written accusation out of the facility with the intention of reporting it to higher authorities.

That extended sequence makes up the film’s first act. What follows is a similarly measured, quietly urgent chronicle of Kornyev’s attempts to escalate the complaint. Over the next few days—and in just five or six additional scenes—the film plunges him into a maze of procedures, evasions and unofficial rules where the adjective “Kafkaesque” barely does justice to the experience. Kornyev finds himself confronting not only the system but also the dawning realization that his youthful belief in the revolution’s righteousness may have been dangerously naïve.

The second prosecutor referenced in the title is the USSR’s chief prosecutor, the man Kornyev hopes to reach so he can officially register the complaint—the proof, he believes, that the revolution he cherishes is being rotted from within by people betraying its ideals. These scenes lay bare the double and triple standards of a power structure governed by realpolitik rather than rhetoric: a shadow world where the speeches say one thing, the back-room dealings another. In the dim corridors of government buildings populated by grey bureaucrats who speak in platitudes while playing their own games, reality reveals itself as something far bleaker—and far more frightening.