It’s 1937, the height of Joseph Stalin’s rule and repressions in the USSR.
A young prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), arrives at a prison in the city of Bryansk after his office received a letter from one of the inmates written in blood. Bypassing the bureaucracy roadblocks, the young man manages to get a meeting with Stepnyak (Aleksandr Filippenko), an Old Bolshevik who tells him about the systematic wrongful convictions and torture practices.
After the old man begs him to go to Moscow and inform Stalin of these injustices, Kornyev sets out to do just that and heads to the Procurator General's office.
Two Prosecutors is the latest feature by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, which premiered earlier this year in the competition of the Cannes Film Festival. The new film comes after a filmography filled with works that set out to exhume the most painful remnants of the Soviet past (In the Fog, State Funeral) and post-Soviet present (A Gentle Creature, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s eponymous story, Donbass). Loznitsa started out as a director of documentary montage films, using archival footage to create chilling tableaus of the corruption of power spanning throughout decades.
Despite having transitioned to live-action features in 2010 with My Joy, the director’s cinematic language still tends to lean heavily toward letting the aesthetic form take the lead and speak louder than any words pronounced. This is also true of the new film; the precision and perfection of its style (highlighted by the camera of Oleg Mutu, one of the greatest cinematographers of the Romanian New Wave) might even trick an unsuspecting viewer into thinking that the Kafkaesque hell depicted on screen is a bit too sanitized to have a true emotional impact. Nothing can be further from the truth, though.
Thematically, Two Prosecutors is the closest to Loznitsa’s 2018 documentary, The Trial, about the unlawful 1930s case against Soviet economists and engineers, who were forced to falsely confess to crimes they didn't commit. Presiding over the court in that case was a notorious Procurator General, Andrei Vyshinsky; he also appears in Two Prosecutors, played by actor Anatoliy Beliy, as the beacon of his young colleague’s hope that his belief in the principles of socialist legality isn’t in vain.
Ironically, the predictability of the outcome of this crusade becomes a major aesthetic tool in Two Prosecutors, as well as the major source of horror it transmits. Even without deep knowledge of who Vyshinsky was, of NKVD, and the terrors of the Great Purge, you get a very clear and disturbing sense of the world you get stuck in for two hours: A bureaucratic hell, the distorted reality of closed doors, senseless procedures, and endless waiting.
The film, based on a novella by a dissident writer, Georgy Demidov, moves between three major locations, with only one of them being an actual prison. The absence of the literal bars in the other places Kornyev ventures to doesn’t fool anyone, though.
Like many idealistic heroes before him, Kornyev (played by Kuznetsov in a way that suggests that the character is aware of the fragility of the world and himself in it) is confronted by the vivid absurdity of the surrounding reality. Certain moments almost play out as a situational comedy in Two Prosecutors, which only serves to increase the terror it generally evokes.
There are different types of hell, and not all of them come equipped with fire pits and torture devices, not from the beginning, at least. Some actually start in office spaces and involve copious amounts of paperwork.