A letter written in blood: A review of “Two Prosecutors” by Sergei Loznitsa3 min read
A woman drops her papers on a staircase inside a government building. Everyone around her freezes, robotically, like the living dead — everyone except Alexander Kornyev, who instinctively bends down to help her. It may be a small scene, but it says everything: this man does not belong here.
Kornyev is a young and newly appointed prosecutor of the Soviet Union. In 1937, during the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, he receives a mysterious letter – written in blood – from a man claiming to have been unjustly tortured and detained by the NKVD (the country’s state security service). Based on Georgy Demidov’s novella of the same name, Sergei Loznitsa’s film Two Prosecutors focuses on the idealistic Kornyev’s efforts to find justice – convinced that if the legal system is alerted to this error, corrections will be made. What follows is a suffocating descent through the corridors of Soviet bureaucracy.
Loznitsa’s direction is deliberately Tarkovskian in its patience. The camera never moves. Rather, it simply watches. Like a surveillance lens, it observes impassively, recording the waiting, locked gates, stairwells, and endless chain of officials Kornyev interacts with. Throughout his journey, someone leads him to someone else, who calls another official, who sends him to another building, and so on. The repetition makes the atmosphere of oppression palpable. We do not just observe Kornyev navigating the system, we endure it alongside him.
Sound is treated with the same restraint. Long stretches pass without dialogue, filled only by footsteps on stone floors, the creak of a door, the echo of an empty corridor. It adds to the tension in a way that words never could.
What distinguishes this film from some other dramas that criticize the Soviet Union is its refusal to caricature. Kornyev is a true believer — loyal, principled, and incorruptible. Even the Procurator General, Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), a real historical figure who was one of the principal architects of Stalin’s purges, is rendered not as a negative figure but as a calm, patient, understanding man. That is what makes you nervous and where the tragedy of this story lies. Konyrev, with his genuine loyalty and belief in the system, must navigate around these men who wear a veil of respectability that hides how dangerous they are.
The film is saturated with subtext and insinuation. This can be seen when Kornyev travels to the prison to see the man who wrote the blood-stained letter, Stepniak. Upon his arrival, the prison governor asks Kornyev, almost casually, whether he knows what happened to his predecessor. Furthermore, upon meeting Stepniak, played by Aleksandr Filippenko, he asks Kornyev whether his parents are still alive, as though weighing up how much danger this young man is walking into. Nobody threatens openly. Everything operates through implication, loaded silences and small acts of menace. The tension is never released. Rather, it coils tighter from the first frame to the last.
One of the film’s most striking points is its portrayal of blind and naïve patriotism. In the opening scene, the letters of condemned prisoners are addressed to Stalin himself. Even Stepniak, when faced with evidence of injustice, advises Kornyev to bring the matter directly to Stalin or the Politburo — as though the leader must simply not know of the injustices being committed in his name. It is a logic that resonates painfully today, particularly in Russia, where many who support Putin insist it is not him but his entourage who are taking advantage of the population, and that he is unaware of the abuses happening around him. Whether this is sincere belief or a convenient excuse to avoid condemning a feared ruler, the film suggests it amounts to the same thing: a faith that protects the system and condemns those who challenge it. The system devours its own faithful.
Two Prosecutors is not an easy watch — it demands the same patience it depicts. But Loznitsa never allows the slowness to become emptiness. Every long corridor, every redundant checkpoint, every bureaucratic dead end is precisely weighted. By the end, you feel as worn down as Kornyev himself, and that exhaustion is the point.
