Two Prosecutors · reception & legacy

How Two Prosecutors has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Premiered in Cannes competition in May 2025 to near-unanimous acclaim — a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, a five-star Guardian rave from Peter Bradshaw, and the François Chalais Prize — and was quickly hailed as a return to peak form for Loznitsa's fiction filmmaking.

What's debated

The split is over the film's glacial austerity: one camp finds it hypnotic and quietly devastating, the other an endurance test, with a critic even grumbling that Loznitsa has 'rarely had so little of substance to say.'

Its footprint

It became 2025 festival-season shorthand for cinema that speaks to the authoritarian present — review after review called its Stalin-era bureaucratic nightmare 'eerily timely' — and a Criterion Channel pickup sealed its prestige status in the US.

Where it stands

An instant canon-climber: one of the best-reviewed films of Cannes 2025 and already a 'you have to sit with this one' pick among slow-cinema devotees on Letterboxd.

Named by the director

Influences Sergei Loznitsa has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• Nikolai Gogol — Loznitsa said Gogol's brand of bureaucratic nightmare kept creeping into the script as he wrote, calling the story a 'typical Russian fairy tale.'
• Franz Kafka — He named Kafka in the same breath as Gogol as the register the film's absurd, labyrinthine officialdom drifted toward.