Sergei Loznitsa, maker of cerebral cinema, returns to Cannes with “Two Prosecutors” and delivers a film as dense as a Soviet investigation file. Behind its solemn atmosphere and historical ambitions, this drama about the Stalinist purges seems to confuse fraud and moral austerity.

Inspired by a text by Georgy Demidov, the film follows a young prosecutor confronted with the conscience of a system he’s expected to blindly serve. The subject is powerful, and Loznitsa, a skilled geometer of the memory, constructs a solid architecture around his subject . Each shot is an empty room, each silence an endless corridor. But by dint of trying to illustrate oppression, the director ends up reproducing it.

The reconstruction is impeccable—the sets, the costumes, the photography, everything exudes technical perfection and the serious intention of accurately recreating the past. But in this icy mastery, something is lost – the human element. The prosecutor, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, cuts through the film like a laser beam: not a shiver, not a crack, not a quiver. And therein lies the problem: how can one denounce dehumanization if the film itself seems to fear the flesh?

At a press conference in Cannes, Alexander Kuznetsov (Kornev) was accused of playing “the nativity.” Kuznetsov defended himself by explaining that he played the role of a government official within a Soviet system of oppression and that he had to deal with the situation at hand.

This explanation doesn’t benefit him because, as a man of justice, he must also deal with the current situation to defend the causes of prisoners, the wrongly imprisoned, and the tortured (see the anonymous prisoner who writes the letter that reaches him because it was saved from the fire). This contradiction exposes a character who embodies a function but is overwhelmed by the situation, unable to cope in the context of the time. His position is disconcertingly resigned, hence the film’s rather predictable ending.

The film doesn’t lack substance, but it seems to have forgotten form, as too much insistence on formalism kills it; the direction is so pared-down that it becomes immaterial. The desire to depict the crushing of the individual by the totalitarian system is obvious, but by filtering everything out—emotion, breath, gaze—the film ends up resembling the world it critiques: cold, bureaucratic, impenetrable. The viewer observes this film’s mechanics with a sense of distance, not prompted by reflection, but by the amazement of being stopped in front of the window of a wax museum.

“TWO PROSECUTORS” is the epitome of a great and important festival film by a major author. A work that we respect more than we feel, that we analyze more than we watch—and which, despite all its dignity, leaves a strange impression: that of having been locked up, not in a cell, but in excessive formalism.