Two Prosecutors

1937: At the peak of Stalin’s purges, gulags were being filled with political prisoners — their letters burned, their due process denied. When a letter from a prisoner (Aleksandr Filippenko) claiming innocence miraculously slips through the censors and reaches the desk of the naïve, freshly graduated prosecutor Alexander Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov), the legal representative sets out to investigate, unaware of the labyrinthine bureaucracy awaiting him. Kornev finds his idealism challenged in his journey for answers as he discovers not only his own powerlessness as a cog in the Soviet machine, but the sheer corruption of the state itself.

Best known for his documentaries, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa here adapts Georgy Demidov’s semi-autobiographical novella as a procedural thriller, crafting a work of cynical suspense. Two Prosecutors channels the spirits of both Gogol and Kafka, cutting the tragedy of its premise with undercurrents of dark irony and austere absurdism. A bleak and urgent film about the nature of truth and pursuit of justice in the face of corruption and totalitarianism.

Like reading a slim paperback classic by Camus or Kafka or Orwell, where the pages are spotted with age, but the insights remain painfully, vividly fresh.

Jessia Kiang, Variety

An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie… It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

5 stars Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Two Prosecutors is a bleak shout of futility that’s also strangely, bitterly funny.

Stephanie Zacharek, Time magazine