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 spin-doctor – played with cool dispassion by Paul Dano.

American journalist and academic Russia specialist Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) has scarcely checked into his Moscow hotel room when he has an unlikely exchange over social media concerning Yevgeny Zamyatin’s proto-Orwellian novel We (1924). Baranov turns out to be the figure on the other end of the exchange. He invites Rowland to his countryside retreat, to which he has retired since leaving Putin’s service a few years before, and there tells him his story – which is, in turn, the story of Russia from early 1990s through the rise of Vladimir Putin.

The son of a devoted Soviet bureaucrat, Baranov is graced with youth when communism crumbles and Russia is caught up in a momentary orgy of formerly forbidden freedoms. Punk rock, poetry and performance art are the intoxicants of these champagne years, and Baranov indulges, launching head-first into a bohemian life as an avant-garde theatre director in Moscow. Anarchy has its dark side: an entire new social class, the oligarchs, springs into existence, filling their pockets. Baranov’s old friend Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) becomes a representative of the oligarchs and makes out like a bandit, eventually adding Baranov’s beloved girlfriend Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) to his haul. 

Baranov also moves on, compelled by the rapid pace of change in those years of cowboy capitalism. He begins to produce trashy reality shows, embracing the deep cynicism of the times. Russia was crumbling under Boris Yeltsin’s hazy rule, and so the oligarchs hatched a plan to seize control, guaranteeing his re-election in exchange for the privatisation of national television – pulling Baranov further up the ranks of power with an invitation to “stop making up stories, start inventing reality”. The oligarchs become Russia’s de facto rulers with Yeltsin as their stooge. But as the leader’s health grows increasingly frail, a successor is needed. Enter former KGB head Vladimir Putin (Jude Law), who they wrongly believe will be their man.

With the invention of a new political entity, the Unity Party, Putin begins his rise. Rather than the stooge the oligarchs 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 Rowland, money is everything; but in modern-day Russia, it is power that ultimately counts. Putin’s hunger for power is matched by Baranov’s nihilistic intellect. Suddenly he is at Putin’s side, coming up with ploys such as co-opting and even producing dissenting groups so that he controls both sides of the narrative; the wizard of the Kremlin emerges as something both innovative and very old: a Rasputin, but one who is working on behalf of the tsar.

The film was clearly produced for Western viewers for whom the inner machinations of Putin’s Russia remain largely an abstraction. Perhaps this helps to justify the decision of Olivier Assayas and his French team to shoot the film in English; but characters speaking a language at odds with their depicted nationality, always a potentially bothersome device, is here difficult to ignore. It is hard to evaluate individual performances when faced with the disconnect of historic characters whom one has heard speak in real life talking in a range of Anglicised accents, many garbled or unintelligible. At any rate, one can appreciate the mild 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 2022 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 the poet and reactionary dissident Eduard Limonov (Magne-Håvard Brekke) – a complex figure about whom Carrère has written his own fictionalised account – it feels as though we’re being treated to a Wikipedia entry. I suspect that if it weren’t for Carrère’s involvement, that 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.

► The Wizard of the Kremlin is in UK cinemas 17 April.