Would it be frivolous to describe Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors as “arresting”? The Ukrainian director’s most recent movie, about prisons within and without, is gripping from the first frame to the last.
Loznitsa’s adaptation of a novella of the same name by Soviet-era political prisoner Georgy Demidov takes place in 1937, at the peak of Joseph Stalin’s notorious Great Purge. The campaign against Communist party opponents, dissenters and the intelligentsia, was enforced by the NKVD, or the secret police. It deliberately defined dissent loosely. Anybody with a legitimate grouse could be described as a counter-revolutionary and thrown into jail, sometimes never to emerge again.
In the film, recently appointed public prosecutor Alexander (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is investigating a complaint that the ailing prisoner Stepnyak (Aleksandr Fillipenko) has somehow managed to smuggle out. Written in Stepnyak’s blood on cardboard – he’s refused paper and ink even though it’s his right – the missive warns of harassment, torture and executions by the staff.
The jail is a sinister masterpiece of architecture and mood. Stepnyak’s cell is at the very end of a series of seemingly never-ending corridors and claustrophobic interconnected chambers. The sound of keys jamming into locks and doors being opened sends a chill down the spine. Alexander must bypass layer upon layer of poker-faced guards, who only take orders from their superior officers. The Soviet Union in the 1930s itself is an open-air prison, the promise of the Russian Revolution already replaced by totalitarianism.
Two Prosecutors was premiered at Cannes in 2025 and is available on Prime Video. Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu’s tight compositions and muted colour palette capture the terrorising design of the hulking prison. Loznitsa creates visual echoes of the theme of incarceration elsewhere in the movie – in the train that takes Alexander to and from Moscow, or the bewildering government office where he tries to meet the chief prosecutor.
The 118-minute movie is mesmerising in its rigour, daring viewers to look away from the horrors of life under complete state control. While set in the past, Two Prosecutors has strong parallels with the present.
There’s the disregard for basic rights or the values of moral decency and justice once power has been seized. A mass crackdown like the Great Purge is possible only when everybody downwards of the tyrant buys into it – and implements it zealously, the film reveals.
Surveillance is widespread, leading to mistrust. The very nature of truth itself has been turned upside down, as Stepnyak painfully reveals. Yesterday’s valuable patriots are today’s inconvenient rebels, who must be removed from view so that their ideas don’t spread to the populace.
None of this is spelt outovertly, but rather is embedded in Loznitsa’s visual design and the loaded conversations between characters, where a word out of place can mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment. For Indian viewers who have been following the trials of prisoners arrested on specious grounds or held without trial for years on end, Two Prosecutors especially hits home.
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