The Wizard of the Kremlin: a westernised take on Putin’s rise to power

• Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival

With the cautionary disclaimer that what we are about to watch is a work of fiction, The Wizard of the Kremlin nevertheless veers awfully close to actual figures and events in rendering a history of Russia from Perestroika to Putin. The narrative centres on the figure of Vadim Baranov – a stand-in for Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s notorious doctor of spin – played with cool dispassion by Paul Dano. 

American journalist and Russia academic specialist Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) has scarcely checked in to his Moscow hotel room when he has an unlikely exchange over social media concerning We, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s proto-Orwellian novel from 1924 that is said to have been a major influence on Stalin, Mao, and their fellow dictatorial elite. Count among them Baranov, who turns out to be the figure on the other end of Rowland’s exchange. Impressed by the American’s masterful knowledge of Zamyatin’s text – and having read Rowland’s article on Putin’s Russia in Foreign Affairs – Baranov invites Rowland to his countryside retreat, to which he has retired since leaving Putin’s service a few years previous. This becomes a ruse through which he can tell his story – which is, in turn, the story of Russia beginning in the early 1990s and up through the rise of a new leader named Vladimir Putin.  

The son of a devoted Soviet bureaucrat, Baranov is graced with jeunesse when communism crumbles and Russia is ensconced in a momentary orgy of formerly forbidden freedoms and what would turn out to be a short-lived democracy in the early 1990s. Punk rock, poetry, and performance art are the fuel of these champagne years, and Baranov drinks freely, launching head-first into a bohemian existence as an avant-garde theatre director in Moscow. Anarchy has its underside, of course; an entire new social class came into existence within a matter of months, filling their pockets with the contents of much of the state’s coffers. Baranov’s old friend Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) becomes a representative of these oligarchs, confessing the secret behind his new fortune over drinks one night: “No one in this country knows what a bank is.” Sidorov does, and makes out like a bandit, eventually adding Baranov’s beloved girlfriend Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) to his bounty.  

Hardened by this new reality, Baranov also moves on, as made necessary by the rapid pace of change in those years of cowboy capitalism. He ditches the starving artist existence for a job producing trashy reality shows, embracing the deep cynicism du jour, a world away from the romantic idealism of just a few months prior. Russia was crumbling under Boris Yeltsin’s alcoholic haze, and so the oligarchs hatched a plan to seize control, guaranteeing the beleaguered leader his re-election in exchange for the privatisation of national television – elevating, in turn, Baranov further up the ranks of power with the seductive invitation to “stop making up stories, start inventing reality.” The oligarchs thus became the de facto rulers of Russia with Yeltsin as their stooge. But as the leader’s health grew increasingly frail, it was clear that a successor was needed. Enter former KGB head Vladimir Putin (Jude Law), who they believed would be their man – wrongly, as Putin makes clear in a private meeting with Baranov just prior to taking power.  

With the invention of a new political entity, the Unity Party, Putin begins his rise. Little do the oligarchs realise the extent of his cunning – until it is much too late. Rather than being the successor stooge they expected, he will brutally rip every vestige of power from their hands, driving most of them into exile – or, as history shows, worse. In your country, Baranov calmly explains to his American interlocutor, money is everything; but in modern day Russia, it is power that ultimately counts. Putin’s hunger for power is matched by the profondeur of Baranov’s nihilistic intellect, and the leader revels in his servant’s counter-intuitive genius. With such notorious moves as co-opting and even producing dissenting groups to ultimately control each side of the narrative, the wizard of the Kremlin emerges as something both innovative and very old: a Rasputin for the Czar.  

The film was clearly produced for a Western viewer for whom the inner machinations of Putin’s Russia remain largely an abstraction. This, in a way, justifies the decision of Olivier Assayas and his French team to shoot the film in English, though of course having characters speak a language that jars with their depicted nationality is always a bothersome dumbing-down factor that is difficult for anyone to ignore; given the subject matter. It is truthfully difficult to evaluate individual performances when faced with the disconnect of historic characters that one has heard speak in real life are depicted using a range of Anglicised accents, many of which are garbled or indiscernible – though one might appreciate the slight irony of having the oligarchs speak in the jargon of Canary Wharf. 

The screenplay – adapted by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère from Giuliano da Empoli’s original novel – struggles with the dual challenge of educating while keeping up with the Hollywood-style pacing to which Assayas, the director, adheres. At times, Dano strains to make the verbosity required by his character come across as natural. At others, such as a scene that briefly and superficially introduces Eduard Limonov (Magne-Håvard Brekke) – a fascinating and complex figure about whom Carrere wrote his own fictionalised novel (a seeming trend among this milieu), the exchange between him and Baranov is not dialogue – it’s a Wikipedia entry. I suspect that if it weren’t for Carrere’s involvement, the scene – which adds nothing to the plot – would have been cut to reduce the 156-minute runtime. Despite these failings, The Wizard of the Kremlin remains essential viewing for understanding the highly sophisticated workings of a totalitarian propaganda state, whose tactics are but a slight refinement of Silicon Valley’s social media industry.