Hedwig GIUSTO

Head of the International Programmes and Editor in Chief of the Progressive Post

by Sergei Loznitsa
France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands and Romania, 2025

For most of this Kafkaesque nightmare set in the USSR in the 1930s, one wonders about the second prosecutor of the title, since it is mostly around the first, Kornyev, a young, recently graduated, idealistic lawyer that the fifth fictional film by Sergei Loznitsa revolves. 

Loznitsa – a Ukrainian director of Belarusian origins, mostly known for found-footage documentaries, such as State Funeral and Maidan – has based this film on a novel by Georgy Demidov. A physicist who was imprisoned in a Siberian gulag for 14 years, Demidov produced a literary work that was translated and published only in 2008, and that remains relatively unknown to this day. 

In the Soviet Union of the Stalinist purges, Kornyev is forced to realise that the ideals of the October Revolution have been swallowed up by an unscrupulous, power-hungry political class composed of incompetent Stalin loyalists. A genuine belief in socialist equality and working-class solidarity no longer offers any protection against the risk of being accused of dissent, which authorities perceive as an infectious disease. And putting one’s trust in the rule of law inexorably leads to the hell of Soviet prisons and torture.

Loznitsa employs a locked-off camera with a claustrophobic, narrow frame. He favours low-saturated colours and thick shadows. Noisy metal gates and barred windows intensify the feeling of entrapment, while dark, narrow stairs descending into the abyss, and wide, opulent staircases climbing malign power hierarchies – and leading to the second prosecutor of the title – create a sense of inevitability. The director’s use of side-lit, at times ‘Caravaggesque’, compositions emphasise physical deformities and environmental decay, creating an atmosphere that is at once theatrical and stark. 

The viewer is drawn to accompany the stubborn prosecutor in his Kafkaesque judicial struggle, in both bare and sumptuous waiting rooms, through the absurdities of Soviet bureaucracy, bizarre encounters and surreal attempts to deter him. It is a crescendo of tension where little happens and yet so much is implied. From the beginning – and this is no spoiler – the audience is aware that Kornyev’s journey has no return, that nobody can be trusted, that there can be no salvation. 

Loznitsa’s film is a masterful account of Soviet authoritarianism and the machinery to silence dissent, built on countless mediocre accomplices. But it is also a powerful and tragic portrait of human faith in justice and the power of law.