Film review Stark, gripping depiction of life under a malign bureaucracy

Two Prosecutors Cannes ★★★★

- Peter Bradshaw

An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie from Sergei Loznitsa, set in Stalin's Russia of the late 1930s and based on a story by the dissident author and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was held in the gulag for 14 years during the second world war and harassed by the state until his death in the late 1980s.

The film, with its extended scenes from single camera positions, mimics the zombie existence of the Soviet state and allows a terrible anxiety to accumulate: it is about a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with guilt.

There is something of Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead and also - with the appearance of two strangely grinning, singing men in a railway carriage - Kafka's The Castle.