Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Sergey Loznitsa. Georgy Demidov provided the source material. In two sittings due to tedium.
Loznitsa is Ukrainian and had interesting things to say in that interview, making me think there was going to be more going on than there was. The first half is pure slow cinema: we spend a lot of time waiting with freshly-minted lawyer now prosecutor Alexander Kuznetsov to visit political prisoner Aleksandr Filippenko during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. He provides an expository dump that causes the credulous protagonist to travel to Moscow in search of the Attorney General who will doubtlessly make things right for Party members in good standing. More happens in the latter half but nothing surprising; the entire project is riven by a naivete that might be touching if only the world wasn't as it is. There is a little of that signature black Russian humour but none of it bites.
Ben Kenigsberg at Roger Ebert's venue: "There isn’t, in the final analysis, that much that happens in the movie [...]. The suspense is simply in waiting for the totalitarian machinery to grind into place." We have ample time to admire the care taken with the details. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. "It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny." — but surely everyone is familiar with weaponized slow walking these days.
