Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Sergei Loznitsa's film Two Prosecutors is made with meticulous care, a concentrated handful of scenes so focused they are almost airless. (That's not meant as criticism – the airlessness is part of the very effective claustrophobia.) Everything has been deliberately put in place to tell the story. There's one scene in the film that sticks out because something sloppy happens—a temporary glitch in the overwhelming gears of the state.
The scene comes well into the film, which is set in the Soviet Union in 1937. An idealistic young prosecutor, Kornyev (Alexander Kuznetsov), has made his way to Moscow after learning about the barbarism of Stalin's secret police in his provincial district; he will speak to the chief prosecutor in the capital, who will surely want to know that the noble ideals of the revolution are being betrayed by such brutal tactics. While navigating the bustling building where the chief has his office, Kornyev is ascending a staircase when an office worker stumbles and drops her sheaf of papers, which cascade across the stairs. A mundane moment, you would think, except that everybody else on the staircase stops, frozen in place, as the young woman and Kornyev stoop to pick up the documents. After the papers are gathered up, everyone moves on.
The pause is unexplained, but the implication that absolutely no one wants to get involved even in a commonplace accident is suggestive: Do the papers have the names of spies, or suspects, or alleged enemies of the state? Would one become tainted by touching such a paper? Is the person looking at you from the landing a spy or a suspect himself, and what will he say about you on the next floor up? The scene has nothing to do with anything else, it turns out, yet it crystallizes a world in which fear poisons everything.
Two Prosecutors is a masterpiece of fear (Loznitsa wrote the screenplay from a novella by Georgy Demidov, a scientist and prisoner of the gulag). Its handful of scenes trace Kornyev's journey from the provincial prison in Bryansk, where he hears the truth from a prisoner (Aleksandr Fillipenko) who had managed to get a note, written in his own blood, out of his cell. Much of the story plays at a Kafkaesque pitch of absurdity, including Kornyev's long wait to get into the office of the chief prosecutor (Anatoliy Beliy), an amazing creature who seems to have already mutated into one of Kafka's bug people, sitting under a huge bust of Stalin and studying Kornyev with a blank gaze that could almost be mistaken for pity.
The movie consists of long, slow dialogue scenes, which guarantees that you are unlikely to forget the remarkable faces on display, beginning with Kuznetsov (a handsome young man with earnest eyes and a squashed boxer's nose) and extending to the two hearty companions Kornyev meets on the train back to Bryansk, who pull out a guitar and sing songs of the motherland. It sounds grim—it is grim—despite the black humor that ripples just under the surface. And yet this movie is also strangely beautiful to look at, as cinematographer Oleg Mutu finds a way to make these interior spaces come to three-dimensional life.
Inside the Moscow state building, a friendly man accosts Kornyev, insisting that they knew each other at law school. Kornyev isn't sure, and he has other things on his mind anyway. Is this person a friend? Or another threat? In a society in which evil has soaked into all levels of existence, every encounter is fraught with hesitation and guardedness; that deadpan on the chief prosecutor's face is the mask needed to survive in such a world. Loznitsa knows that he is describing 1937 Russia but also the present day, and the brilliance of this film is thus multiplied. He also knows he doesn't have to push any comparisons, the aroma of man-made evil being so powerful that it lingers long after the last Russian folk song has faded from the end credits. This superb film has that familiar effect of watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers: You come out of it, look around, and see that the monsters are already securely in place.
April 3, 2026
