Sightlines · reception
How Two Prosecutors was received
2025 · Sergei Loznitsa · Two Prosecutors on Sightlines
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.
Did you know? The source novella was written by Georgy Demidov, a physicist who survived over a decade in the Gulag; the KGB confiscated his manuscripts, and his daughter only recovered and published them years after his death.
Named by the director
- 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.