Cannes 2025 - Two Prosecutors by Sergei Loznitsa

Two Prosecutors lays bare the machinery of Stalinist justice with an unflinching severity. From its opening moments, the film is all about patience, repetition, and an almost punishing attention to procedure. Nothing is rushed, nothing softened. The horrors of the regime are not dramatised through spectacle or excess, but through process, forms, corridors, silences and the slow grinding down of an individual who still believes, at least initially, that the system can be reasoned with. 

Set in the Soviet Union in 1937, at the height of the Stalinist purges, the film follows Alexander Kornev, a newly appointed local prosecutor who receives a letter from a detainee falsely accused by the regime. While thousands of such letters are systematically destroyed, this one reaches his desk. Convinced that the case points to abuses by the NKVD, Kornev attempts to pursue the matter through official channels, a decision that gradually draws him deeper into the inner workings of a system designed to extinguish any notion of justice.As he attempts to do his job “properly,” he is confronted with the quiet but absolute logic of a system designed to produce guilt rather than truth. 

The film never frames him as a hero; if anything, it presents him as a functionary whose faith in rules and procedure becomes his greatest vulnerability. The pace is glacial, deliberately so. Scenes stretch beyond comfort matching the character's long, frustrating endeavour made of barely polite rebuttal and long waits for officials to even turn up.

These extended durations are not an arthouse indulgence but skilfully convey the weighs on the protagonist, making the ordeal not simply something to observe but something to endure. The camera is precise, restrained and the use of negative space within a tight aspect ratio immediately creates a sense of oppression, limiting peripheral vision and reinforcing the feeling of enclosure. Characters are frequently framed with empty areas around them (bare walls, long corridors, vacant offices...), suggesting a kind of freedom that exists only in appearance. 

The young prosecutor moves through these spaces ostensibly freely, but every step is circumscribed by invisible boundaries. The illusion of autonomy is one of the film’s most disturbing ideas. What is striking is how little the film relies on overt violence. Threats are rarely spoken aloud, punishments are often implied rather than shown. At first, the protagonist approaches his task with diligence and confidence, trusting that evidence and legal reasoning will carry weight. Gradually, small inconsistencies emerge, requests go unanswered and meetings are postponed...

The film is careful not to mark a single turning point; instead, it traces a slow erosion of certainty. What collapses is not just the case, but the very idea that the system exists to correct itself. Performances across the board are restrained and disciplined. There are no emotional outbursts, no grand gestures. Faces remain guarded, voices measured. This restraint reinforces the film’s central argument: that under such a regime, survival depends on opacity. Everyone has learned to say only what is necessary, to reveal nothing that could later be used against them. The young prosecutor’s mistake is not arrogance but transparency, a belief that clarity and good faith still have a place. The film’s visual austerity extends to its interiors, which are stripped of warmth and personality. Offices, interrogation rooms, and administrative spaces blur into one another, creating a sense of institutional monotony. 

There is a quiet, accumulating dread in the way the film handles repetition. The same procedures recur, the same phrases are uttered, the same gestures repeated with slight variations. The film does not explain this explicitly; it allows the pattern to reveal itself through persistence. The viewer is left to draw the conclusion that the outcome was never in doubt. What gives Two Prosecutors its particular force is its refusal to provide catharsis. Even the protagonist’s suffering is not framed as singular or tragic, it is one instance among many.

By the end, what lingers is not a specific image or line of dialogue, but the slow realisation that the system does not need to crush you violently if it can simply outlast you. Two Prosecutors is a demanding film, but a deeply serious one, and its depiction of corrupted justice feels as relevant as it is historically grounded. It leaves little room for comfort, and that, ultimately, is its point.

Review by Laurent de Alberti

Star rating: ★★★★☆

Official Selection, in Competition.

Two Prosecutors. Directed by Sergei Loznitsa. Starring Alexander Kuznetsov, Anatoly Beliy...