There’s a particular chill to Sergei Loznitsa’s cinema, the way it studies systems with the patience of a documentarian and the pressure of a vise. The filmmaker behind “In the Fog” and “Babi Yar. Context” returns with “Two Prosecutors,, and with it, another rigorously controlled descent into institutional power, moral compromise, and the machinery designed to grind conviction into compliance.
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Set in the Soviet Union in 1937, the film begins with an image of despair that doubles as procedure: letters from detainees falsely accused by the regime are burned in a prison cell. Against the odds, one survives the fire and reaches its destination, landing on the desk of a newly appointed local prosecutor, Alexander Kornyev. Kornyev tries to meet the prisoner, a man he believes has been targeted by the secret police, the NKVD. A dedicated Bolshevik who still believes integrity has a place inside the system, the young prosecutor suspects something rotten beneath the paperwork.
That suspicion becomes a path, then an obsession. Kornyev’s pursuit of justice takes him toward Moscow and the office of the Attorney General, deeper into corridors where authority is both everywhere and nowhere, and where the act of asking the wrong question can mark you as the next problem to be solved. In the age of Stalin’s purges, “Two Prosecutors” frames that journey as a plunge through bureaucracy that’s engineered to appear orderly while quietly erasing the very idea of truth.
The film stars Aleksandr Kuznetsov as Kornyev, alongside Alexander Filippenko and Anatoli Beliy. Loznitsa writes and directs, Kevin Chneiweiss produces, and Janus Films handles U.S. distribution.
The film premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and our review framed its dread as historical, circling back into the present. “No matter how liberal society believes it has evolved, it consistently returns to wreak havoc,” Gregory Ellwood wrote.
Janus Films’ release plan is straightforward and confident: “Two Prosecutors” opens in New York on March 20, followed by Los Angeles on March 27. Watch the trailer below.
