‘The Wizard Of The Kremlin’ review: Jude Law impresses as Vladimir Putin in Oliver Assayas drama

Dir. Olivier Assayas. France. 2025. 156mins

Olivier Assayas’s English-language The Wizard of the Kremlin is undeniably compelling – and the way might it not be, on condition that it tells one of the fascinating tales in current world historical past? Not directly an account of the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, it additionally recounts the Faustian apprenticeship of his resident strategist; right here named Vadim Baranov and performed by Paul Dano. The movie’s important downside is that the dense narrative is over-dependent on dialogue and exposition – historic, political, philosophical.

By no means fairly involves life as a personality sketch

Following his modern-history dramas Carlos (2010) and Wasp Community (2019), French cosmopolitan Assayas may be very a lot in his factor adapting Giuliano da Empoli’s best-selling 2022 roman à clef, recreating Nineties and 2000s Russia with panache and element. There are additionally some placing performances, not least from Jude Regulation as Putin, though Dano might be distractingly mannered. As a flamboyant corridors-of-power drama, The Wizard casts its spell imposingly – however usually in functionally informative docudrama style. This explicit combine ought to make for upmarket area of interest publicity following its Venice competitors premiere, whereas possible limiting its attraction to Assayas’s normal cinephile following.

Assayas’s screenplay collaborator is author/film-maker Emmanuel Carrère (Between Two Worlds), a long-time documenter of Russia’s turbulent metamorphoses. A gap caption declares that the movie is ’an unique work of fiction’, however, like da Empoli’s novel, it’s manifestly an oblique portrait of Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s adviser for 20 years, who has been known as ’the architect of the Russian political system.’ Right here, named Vadim Baranov, he’s first introduced by the movie’s narrator (Jeffrey Wright) as a person whose disappearance from energy has solely made him extra transfixing a legend. 

The motion begins in 2019, with Wright as an American author in Russia to analysis a guide on Evgeny Zamyatin, whose Nineteen Twenties novel We presciently anatomised totalitarian energy. He finds himself summoned to the nation dacha of Baranov, a Zamyatin fan, who tells him his personal story intimately. It begins within the post-glasnost years when Russian society, youth particularly, discovered new freedom – a heady interval epitomised by a riotous avant-punk occasion, the place the still-gauche Baranov meets Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), an enigmatic, cynical wild little one first seen performing a rock-dominatrix routine.

They turn into lovers – though she later leaves him for flashy entrepreneur Dmitri Sidorov (a charismatically swaggering Tom Sturridge, in a job drawing on real-life oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Baranov, in the meantime, progresses from avant-garde theatre to trashy TV (key rule: don’t be boring). He then turns into right-hand man to TV magnate Boris Berezovsky (Will Eager), whose media manipulations stored doddery premier Boris Yeltsin in energy. However a brand new man is required within the Kremlin, not least to keep up Berezovsky’s personal energy, so he and Baranov strategy FSB head Vladimir Putin (Regulation) to be their puppet candidate. Initially enjoying reluctant, Putin accepts the function – however immediately reveals that he’s no-one’s stooge.

For a very long time, it isn’t solely clear the place Baranov’s wizardry lies – though he’s an ice-cool buyer unafraid to talk fact to energy. Later, although, he recruits of a number of conflicting oddball factions – like an extremist biker gang and the ‘Nationwide Bolshevik Social gathering’ led by literary star Eduard Limonov, all of them turning into a manipulable ‘official opposition’. He additionally creates Russia’s ‘troll farm’ cyber-strategy to maintain the West completely confused. 

A screenplay dense with incident and ideological dialogue is carried effectively by fast-moving, glossy course and opulent mise en scene that catches the tone of a altering society and its sudden explosion of capitalist extra. But it by no means fairly involves life as a personality sketch – though Dano efficiently depicts Baranov’s arc from younger counter-culturist to pampered bureaucrat drunk on his personal smarts. Dano’s efficiency might be likeably susceptible in addition to demonically chilly, however the muted, silky supply typically hits Malkovich ranges of archness.

Vikander’s blasé glamourista has the air of a bored British posh woman – a lot of the movie’s accents are English – and she or he hardly ever convinces as greater than the glimmering picture One of the best performances are from Will Eager, spivvish and tautly agitated as Berezovksy, and from Regulation, whose Putin combines dead-eyed bureaucrat and embodiment of political Id, simmering with barely contained rage in opposition to his opponents and at historical past itself.