On May 27, see the enthralling, Baltic-produced historical drama Two Prosecutors! Based upon a long-unpublished novella by Soviet gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, Two Prosecutors paints a hypnotic, chilling, blackly comic portrait of the mechanisms of Great Purge-era tyranny, with a potent contemporary resonance.
Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic state lawyer (Alexander Kuznetsov) pushes past the prison’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko). The young attorney, determined to expose the miscarriages of justice that landed the man in confinement, finds the eye of the state turned on him instead, as an ever-tightening net encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the Great Purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s latest triumph is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and matter-of-fact horrors of fascism.
“Loznitsa holds you rapt with brutal faces, restless camera work, meticulous filmmaking, shivers of bitter wit, and scenes of characters just talking that set your heart to racing. This is the kind of international title that enriches American moviegoing life.” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times)