Two Prosecutors: bureaucracy is the enemy in this meticulously crafted USSR-set period drama

The run-up to the outbreak of World War II saw the curious phenomenon of people fleeing Stalin’s Soviet Union for refuge in Nazi Germany, their reasoning being that Hitler wasn’t anywhere near as bad. Bizarre as this notion may seem in hindsight, statistical evidence at the time backed them, as Stalin’s Great Terror had unleashed what were then unprecedented horrors.

We’re told at the start of Sergei Loznitsa’s new film that it’s set in 1937, at the height of the Terror, making its grim outcome all but inevitable. Further scene-setting comes via a pre-credits sequence in which a Methuselah-like prisoner in a jail in the city of Bryansk is asked to burn a sackful of letters in a stove (for which he’s given a paltry number of matches, the calculated restriction of resources being a recurring theme). He skim-reads a handful of pleading letters to Comrade Stalin which each insist on its author’s innocence, before alighting on a scrap of paper from one I.S. Stepniak, whose text is apparently written in blood.

Defying explicit rules, this he saves, and it somehow reaches newly qualified local prosecutor Aleksandr Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov). Intrigued by Stepniak’s claim to be harbouring “vital information”, he invokes his office’s authority and requests an audience. A quarter of the running time has already elapsed before he gets to see the prison governor (Vytautas Kaniušonis), and a full third before he finally comes face to face with Stepniak. The interim is filled with endless trudging along corridors and flights of stairs, or sitting on hard-backed chairs in nondescript rooms for hours on end (a clock on the wall confirms at least five), while being given transparently bogus excuses for the complications of this notionally routine visit.

There’s a similarly drawn-out waiting scene later on, a reminder that Loznitsa once made a surprisingly gripping film about a bus queue. Landscape (2003), Two Prosecutors itself, and much else in his output would surely have been denounced as ‘formalist’ by Stalin’s apparatchiks, an accusation that could lead to the premature termination of an artist’s career and even life. In the case of Two Prosecutors – shot in desaturated near-monochrome by Loznitsa’s regular colleague, the Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu – this formal rigour extends to a locked-down camera and the squarish Academy aspect ratio (in use during the Stalinist period itself) framing a variety of compositions that treat the film’s characters as mere chess pieces, their moves strictly circumscribed, with capture a constant threat.

Threats are also embedded in outwardly banal small talk. The prison governor casually asks Kornyev if he knows where his predecessor is now; Stepniak asks him if his parents are still alive (presumably weighing up whether his information will only put Kornyev at potential risk). Meticulously calibrated Pinteresque pauses are just as eloquent as the words surrounding them. There are oddly unsettling encounters: in Moscow, a complete stranger bumps into Kornyev on the stairs of the chief prosecutor’s office in and jovially claims to know him, and a couple of engineers on the train returning to Bryansk are all cheery, laddish bonhomie… at first.

The film revolves around three context-setting monologues, delivered by Stepniak and a disabled war veteran nicknamed ‘Pegleg’ (both played by Aleksandr Filippenko, one shaven-headed, the other under a hairy thicket), and finally by Kornyev himself, once he’s managed to see Chief Prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), a real historical figure who was one of the key people in Stalin’s purges – a fact of which Kornyev is sublimely unaware, but which much of the audience for a film like this will surely know going in.

Kornyev is an archetypal dramatic hero, a man doggedly in quest of both truth and justice, his visibly broken nose (shown in profile at an early stage) belying his slight frame and suggesting that he can fight his way out of a corner if need be. There’s no questioning the fundamental righteousness of his cause, but the era’s history suggests not merely that he’s certain to fail but that elaborate mechanisms have been put in place to guarantee it. The film’s regular recourse to the relief of comic grotesquerie comes via Gogol and Kafka (both acknowledged influences), but its study of the mechanism of total oppression and the cynical sidelining of a once-respected legal system resonates well beyond the 1930s. In particular, there will surely be an audible reaction to Stepniak’s despairing line about how “honest, knowledgeable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans”.

► Two Prosecutors is in UK cinemas from 27 March.