The Russians Are Killing the Russians Are Killing: Assayas Bungles Political Espionage
Of the many significant issues severely hobbling The Wizard of the Kremlin, the latest film from French auteur Olivier Assayas, the most egregious is how incredibly stupid it believes its audience to be. Characters freely interpret for us the meaning behind every moment, like professors lecturing us through interpretive stage dialogue. Add to this a thick porridge of Europa flavored accents from the primarily English language performers, led by the shockingly miscast Paul Dano, and it completes a recipe for one of the esteemed director’s biggest failures. It’s a pity considering Assayas’ formidable and diverse body of work, which features several high profile entries in a similar genre, from the exceptional Carlos (2010) to the similarly compromised Wasp Network (2019). Based on the 2022 award winning novel by Giuliano da Empoli, loosely modeled on Russian politician Vladislav Surkov, and with the likes of Emmanuel Carrère adapting the screenplay, this fictional saga of contemporary Russia’s backslide into totalitarianism with the rise of Vladimir Putin is a remedially administered contrivance.
In 2019, Moscow, a journalist (Jeffrey Wright) who is an expert on Russian politics, happens to be invited to meet Vadim Baranov (Dano), a man he’d written a book about and who had served as a ‘fixer’ for Vladimir Putin. (Jude Law). Having recently retired, relegated to a palatial estate outside the city, Baranov is amused at what’s been written about him but wishes to set the record straight. And so begins a lengthy journey narrating Baranov’s youth as an actor who would eventually be a key figure in Putin’s rise to fame as first Prime Minister and then acting President following the resignation of Boris Yeltsin on the eve of the new century. Baranov relays how he became Putin’s personal confidante, the invisible figure behind some of his employer’s most dastardly deeds, for which he earned the nickname, ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin.’
Jeffrey Wright all but disappears from the film after providing the framing device which feels as if he’s on his way to interview an Anne Rice character. The gravity with which Wright delivers his dialogue sets a tone telling us “Pay no attention to the man behind the iron curtain.” The laborious narration starts with him, which is quickly transported to Dano’s man of mystery, who speaks in sedate whispers, lending him a pretentious, bitchy demeanor. This could have worked as camp had he seemed witty. Dano, unfortunately, becomes a repellant presence we never escape from, soaking us in a constant stream of narration for the first hour, hailing back to his origins as a wannabe actor in 1990s Moscow (with Dano suspiciously playing the character as twenty-something). Dano’s performance is the equivalent of James Mason playing some kind of ambitious Euro-sleaze for Hitchcock in North by Northwest (1959). But at least with Mason there was at least the possibility for the suspension of disbelief.
We’re meant to believe an impassioned affair with Alicia Vikander’s Ksenia is another element which leads Vadim down a dark path, but this isn’t something the film is successful at selling. Neither is Ksenia’s supposed outlandish, vibrant personality. That’s one of many details we’re told rather than shown. Ksenia disappears for a while to pop up at the end, though she’s clearly opposed to how Vadim makes a living. On the sidelines, Jude Law seems to be having fun (as he is prone to seeming) playacting as Putin, the civil servant whose brooding resentment for the oligarchs of the Yeltsin era stokes the embers for the full-blown dictatorship the country would return to after the communist thaw. But this toxic relationship between Putin and his sinister little ‘yes’ man never really seems to carry any weight. This is a dynamic which should feel like Roy Cohn pulling the puppet strings animating a similar charlatan on the other side of the globe.
The script traverses some of the major highlights of Putin’s rise to power, including, among other events, the Second Chechen War, his ambivalence towards the Kursk submarine tragedy, all the way up to the annexation of Crimea. Carrère also includes another darling in these events with a brief aside featuring Eduard Limonov, who was the subject of his phenomenal 2011 publication (and the subpar film adaptation from Kirill Serebrennikov in 2024).
The Wizard of the Kremlin, like the Limonov adaptation (and let’s not forget Thomas Vinterberg’s 2018 film The Command, a dramatic reenactment of the Kursk), all suffer significantly from utilizing distracting parameters to present the Russian disposition (which is made all more obvious when side characters with more realistic accent work flit about in the background). It’s a pity, considering some of the withering asides suggesting more exacting explication, such as “There’s no bloodier dictator than the people,” in reference to the public’s delight in the ruin of wealthy and notable men. It’s true, but also obvious.
That said, production design and cinematography (from Assayas’ usual collaborators, Francois-Renaud Labarteh and DP Yorick Le Saux, respectively) at least makes this visually interesting, and maybe plays better on mute, but it’s a film which basks in banality, at its best inspiring a sense of apathy when it should be evoking dread in the vein of classic 1970s paranoid political thrillers. For all its referencing of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s classic dystopian novel We, this film is a counter to this quote: “A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t even be worth reading.” As presented in this film version, Vadim Baranov is not a man who is like a novel.
Reviewed on August 31st at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (82nd edition) – In Competition. 156 Mins.
★½/☆☆☆☆☆
