Under a totalitarian regime that is rotten to the core, to be a fair-minded, outspoken citizen is tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant, as Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa sets out with chilling, masterfully controlled precision in his brilliant and gripping new drama Two Prosecutors, which had its world premiere in Cannes and screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival in the In Focus programme.

Based on a novella by Georgy Demidov, a Soviet physicist who spent fourteen years in a gulag as a political prisoner, its mordant absurdity has shades of both Kafka and Gogol, and is delivered with the lean sophistication of a director already proved to be an adept chronicler in both documentary and drama of the grim dances of state repression and civic resistance. The film is set in the USSR in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, but its stark relevance for today’s era of resurgent authoritarianism is unmistakable. A pointed warning, it’s among Loznitsa’s sharpest dissections of regime terror and its mechanisms yet.

Alexander Kornyev, a new local prosecutor (an impressive Alexander Kuznetsov), is a dedicated Bolshevik. His belief that the system is overseen by men of great principle, who would not hesitate to intervene should they catch wind of any case of lower-level power abuse, is almost fable-like in its innocence, though his faith is fading fast and the young appointee is already looking pale and harried. Letters from falsely accused political prisoners, some whose dedication to communism did not save them from falling foul of the regime, are routinely burnt in Bryansk’s prison before their appeals can be read by those with influence. One message written in blood miraculously made it to Kornyev’s desk, activating the energetic sense of duty that may prove his undoing.

As soon as Kornyev arrives at the jail from a long train journey to request a meeting with the detainee, he is plunged into a surreal waiting game by the cynical staff who are taken aback by this rare sort of investigation and uneager to grant him access or guide him through the austere corridors. Right from the start, there’s an inexorable sense of dreadful inevitability that this cannot end well for the visitor. But Loznitsa is a genius at suspenseful ambiguity, and keeps us guessing over the specifics of how his fate will play out, in a system awash with hypocrisy and suspicion, where most citizens survive by veiling their genuine thoughts and intentions.

Acclaimed D.O.P. Oleg Mutu impeccably lenses this world of deception and entrapment for maximum claustrophobia, boxed into cells, poky waiting rooms, corridors and cramped train carriages where strangers crowd Kornyev with artificial smiles, ghoulish jokes and prying questions. The prison and officious institutions where the action takes place and “communist justice” is decided and delivered are so bled of vivid colour as to be almost monochrome.

When Kornyev persists enough to meet with the letter-writer, Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), he is greatly impacted by the prisoner’s scars of torture and panicked descriptions of the extraction of false confessions. Stepniak, a once great legal mind and now victim of the NKVD (the secret police), ousted from party favour and left to rot in silent isolation, recognises this is not only the first but probably the last sympathetic ally from the outside he will encounter. Acting on blind faith that seeking out an ear right at the top will be the most fruitful strategy to rectify this travesty, Kornyev traverses the country again determined to meet and share his findings with the Attorney General in Moscow, yet another stage in a very dangerous, and vastly unequal, game of cat and mouse. That the idealistic hope of this young prosecutor, already deep inside the cogs of the system, comes across as barely credible naivete at points is perhaps the most devastating aspect of all. His human urge to empathy is so out of place in this all-encompassing hell of corruption and normalised moral decay, where loyal incompetents are much more useful than principled believers for shoring up brute power, that it is nothing short of peculiar for all whose orbit is impinged upon by his inconvenient reports.

Director, Screenwriter: Sergei Loznitsa
Producer: Kevin Chneiweiss
Cinematographer: Oleg Mutu
Editor: Danielius Kokanauskis
Cast: Alexander Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoly Beliy
Production Design: Jurij Grigorovi?, Aldis Meinerts
Sound Design: Vladimir Golovnitski
Music: Christiaan Verbeek
Production companies: SBS Productions (France), LOOKSfilm, Atoms & Void, Avanpost Media, Studio Uljana Kim, The Match Factory
Sales: Coproduction Office
Venue: Sarajevo (In Focus)
In Russian