There is no nightmare greater than that of bureaucracy

Two Prosecutors begins with the gate of a prison opening and ends with another closing. This circular trajectory delimits the hero's adventure, Kornev, a young prosecutor in Stalin's Russia, who, upon discovering the torture and forced confessions to which the survivors of the old guard of the Communist Party in his region are subjected, wants to bring this scandal to the attention of the Soviet leadership. The problem, however, is that his idealistic view (that of someone who "is still a virgin," as some characters who see themselves in his path slyly insinuate) is the only one that doesn't realize the corrupt world he moves in.

The Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa has dedicated a good part of his career to portraying the ignominies past, present, and probably future of the Russian government, as well as the resilience of the individuals who remain under its control. But if on other occasions he has opted for striking parables that lean towards the grotesque, in Two Prosecutors (the fifth fiction in a filmography rooted in documentary) he opts for the opposite strategy: that of a suffocating grip that tightens with the immutable calm of someone who knows what the outcome of the game will be, and which unfolds through a bureaucracy that creates a labyrinth of dilated time. In this sense, the most unsettling figure in the work is surely that of the man sitting by a bust of Lenin on the landing of the stairs of an administration building, who asks in a thin voice where the exit is.