Review of The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025)
Seen in 2026.
Seen in a packed theatre at Göteborg Film Festival 2026.
Fictional Vadim Baranov is the son of a high-culture bigshot of the Soviet Union, but that is worth little when the Union is dissolved. He hustles for a while, directs a stage adaptation of We (1924) as a student, and then moves on to television. His boss, who was almost murdered by another oligarch in Russia’s new political landscape, is a propagandist. In Boris Yeltsin’s final term as president, the TV men find a candidate for the unpopular position of Yeltsin’s prime minister: A grey FSB officer who seems malleable. His name is Putin, and though he doesn’t like public speaking, he likes Baranov’s ideas about psychoanalysis and a return to obvious hierarchy.
Baranov is a composite based mainly on Vladislav Surkov, whose background is different in important details. Baranov is portrayed as an artist who falls into moral compromise and addiction to power only gradually. That would be too romantic an interpretation of Surkov, who did study theatre, but who then switched to economics and spent the first half of the 1990s in PR for a bank.
I don’t dismiss the entire screenplay as romantic. There’s an effort to bring some intellectual and nationalist depth to Baranov’s character that goes beyond his seduction by money, power, and glamour, but the presence of the fiction poisons the delivery of the facts in a way that should have been obvious to anyone reading about Surkov.
There are good flourishes, but it is fatal that the production doesn’t sell the mix of fact and fiction, nor either one by itself. Paul Dano, under French direction, speaks slow, unruffled English with very little variation, from the framework narrative—Baranov interviewed by an American writer—through most of the flashbacks. He gets a couple of good speeches in that off-putting style, but it fits nowhere else. Alicia Vikander is a better actor, but her female lead gets nothing interesting to do after We. Worse, there’s an underlying exoticization of Russian culture that extends even into the chapter titles, one of which uses the bad trick of putting Cyrillic letters matched by appearance alone into Latin words. For an introduction to the history, prefer Hypernormalisation (2016).