Start the week with a film: ‘Two Prosecutors’ chillingly reveals what total state control looks like

Would it be frivolous to describe Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors as “arresting”? The Ukrainian director’s most recent movie, about prisons within and without, is gripping from the first frame to the last.

Loznitsa’s adaptation of a novella of the same name by Soviet-era political prisoner Georgy Demidov takes place in 1937, at the peak of Joseph Stalin’s notorious Great Purge. The campaign against Communist party opponents, dissenters and the intelligentsia, was enforced by the NKVD, or the secret police. It deliberately defined dissent loosely. Anybody with a legitimate grouse could be described as a counter-revolutionary and thrown into jail, sometimes never to emerge again.

In the film, recently appointed public prosecutor Alexander (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is investigating a complaint that the ailing prisoner Stepnyak (Aleksandr Fillipenko) has somehow managed to smuggle out. Written in Stepnyak’s blood on cardboard – he’s refused paper and ink even though it’s his right – the missive warns of harassment, torture and executions by the staff.

The jail is a sinister masterpiece of architecture and mood. Stepnyak’s cell is at the very end of a series of seemingly never-ending corridors and claustrophobic interconnected chambers. The sound of keys jamming into locks and doors being opened sends a chill down the spine. Alexander must bypass...

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