The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (MY JOY) is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov) to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world.
“The film’s fascination lies in its fabric, the devastation in its detail, from the speed with which a fallen body is removed from the prison yard as if it had never been there to the way we catch Kornyev jumping fractionally when a buzzer sounds…. an almost tactile literariness, like reading a slim paperback classic by Camus or Kafka or Orwell, where the pages are spotted with age, but the insights remain painfully, vividly fresh.” —Jessica Kiang, Variety "This story of civic injustice isn’t just a great achievement by the director. It’s a cautionary tale about the repetition of tragic moments in history." —Patrice Witherspoon, ScreenRant “Impeccably directed and impressively acted, this slow-burn story of political injustice is filled to the brim with atmosphere…revealing what it was like to live at a time when personal freedom was all but extinguished by rampant authoritarianism.” —Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter
