The title of Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin, knowingly evokes vividly Technicolored Hollywood fantasies: There’s no place like Motherland; please pay attention to the man behind the (Iron) curtain. An Italian Swiss think-tanker, essayist, and high-end political adviser, da Empoli is fascinated by Machiavellian machinations. The book’s protagonist, Vadim Baranov, is a sorcerer skilled in the dark arts of propaganda and ideological brand management. The character is a thinly fictionalized version of Vladislav Surkov, widely regarded as the reigning trickster of twenty-first-century Russian politics, a “poet among wolves” with a direct line to the leader of the pack.
Like his real-life model, Baranov is a lapsed artist with a knack for stagecraft. He’s a former avant-garde theater director turned reality-television producer who willingly sells out and takes over the stewardship of Vladimir Putin’s public image in the early 2000s, manning his post through the Kadyrov Pact and the dog days of Russiagate in the United States to the inception of the Ukrainian war. The culture warrior-to-apparatchik pipeline makes for a fascinating and disconcerting professional case study. Resentful of what he perceives as the decadent and desultory sophistication of his fellow intellectuals—and attuned to an ambient yearning among the masses to Make Russia Great Again—Baranov styles himself as an amplifier for a strongman’s vox populi rhetoric. Putin has a penchant for appearing bare-chested in manly poses, and Baranov uses that charisma as a blunt instrument to renovate the country’s dilapidated power structure.
Whereas the world-weary Boris Yeltsin required propping up in public appearances, Putin towers proudly before the cameras. An avatar of vertikal vlasti, he stands at the peak of a top-down power structure predicated on the paranoid supplication of staffers and civilians alike. Baranov has no illusions about Putin’s hardwired authoritarian nature even as he works fast and furiously to conjure illusions for others. “There is nothing wiser,” he explains wryly, “than to bet on the madness of men.”
On the page, The Wizard of the Kremlin excels as a twisty, fact-based picaresque about high-rollers gambling with matters of life and death, and hung up on the breakneck exhilaration of letting it ride. Olivier Assayas’s film version of The Wizard of the Kremlin is impressively faithful to its source’s speed and sprawl, as well as to its Matryoshka-like narrative structure. In the adaptation, with a screenplay co-written by Assayas and French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, an American academic, Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), visits the wily, worldly Baranov (Paul Dano). They are, ostensibly, to discuss the work of dissident Soviet satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1924 dystopian novel, We—an acknowledged influence on George Orwell’s 1984—is a point of mutual interest. Like a lot of like-minded literary types, they first connected online, but Baranov wants to do more than host a Russian-lit book club. He takes Lawrence’s visit to his snowy dacha as a cue to methodically recount the phases of his sentimental education.
One of Assayas’s specialties is capturing the heady sensations endemic to coming-of-age, especially for those striving to live la vie bohème; his best movies, including Cold Water (1994) and Something in the Air (2012), perch on the proverbial edge of 17. He’s thus in his sweet spot restaging Baranov’s salad days as a precocious, overgrown child of privilege. We get sweaty, shirtless punk-rock shows; salacious performance art interludes; rhetorical dick-measuring contests; bondage play and S&M theatrics; and, more centrally, decades-spanning situationship between Baranov and high-maintenance party-girl Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose luscious corruptibility—exemplified by her attraction to designer items and the men who subsidize their acquisition—has a symbolic dimension.
Ksenia isn’t so much a character as an avatar of the hedonism unleashed by the thawing of the Cold War, and the film unfolds as an exploration of how these freedoms give way to ever-deeper and more insidious forms of repression. If Baranov is a wizard, he has also fallen under his own spell; his Rasputin-ish powers of persuasion extend to a form of self-hypnosis, whereby he grows steadily insensible to the consequences of his increasingly ruthless rhetoric.
The writer Eduard Limonov once paid Surkov a backhanded compliment by saying he’d managed to turn Russia into a massive postmodern theatrical production, and the same could be said of Baranov. Glimpses of his earlier stage and television work hint at real talent and avant-garde nerve veiled by an increasingly expedient cynicism, and Assayas maps the process by which opportunism engulfs artistic expression. “Stop making up stories and start inventing reality,” instructs scheming oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who has recruited Baranov and his collaborators to Putin’s ranks. Berezovsky and his cronies are looking to consolidate their economic interests, and they’re betting on Putin as the man who can ram through their agenda (they’ll come to rue that decision). The group’s offer to Baranov entails things that any aspiring auteur would kill for: a big budget, access to the best equipment, and the means to reach a mass audience hungry for a mix of tradition and sensationalism.
Baranov is just the man to cross those streams, as fluent in nineteenth-century literature as he is in MTV (Surkov once claimed to be fond of Tupac Shakur and Jackson Pollock), and he begins to do so readily, enabled by more relaxed attitudes toward Western tactics in the post-USSR era. He’s packaging his star client as a hybrid figure, a relic of the KGB with his eyes on a better future; “what interests me is power,” says Putin in the trailer, played by a dead-eyed, jaw-jutting Jude Law, coming through with a suitably cold and calculating performance—all coiled, tensile strength and unapologetic contempt, tinged here and there with judicious bits of ridiculousness (as when we see him jet-skiing and pumping iron like Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Law’s ex–pretty boy status is slightly distracting; when Putin pouts that the Americans treat him like he’s the president of Finland, Law could be back in The Talented Mr. Ripley, whining that Matt Damon won’t stop crowding him. His British accent, too, is notable: When The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered—a bit unprepossessingly, considering its pedigree—at last fall’s Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, critics made much of Assayas’s decision to have all of the major characters speak in English without put-on Russian inflections; the critic for the U.K.-based film magazine Sight and Sound jeered at “the mild irony of having oligarchs speak in the jargon of Canary Wharf.” Yet given the underlying themes of globalization, it should be clear that such tactics are deliberate: “Making the film in English gave it something more universal,” Assayas told an interviewer about the film’s casting and dialogue. The use of the techniques from television to manipulate an entertainment-addicted public and puff up a strongman is hardly unique to Russia, after all.
Like a lot of recent ruling-class satires, from Succession to The Apprentice, The Wizard of the Kremlin luxuriates in first-class textures—VIP sections and pri-vate yachts; inner-circle briefings and closed-door meetings—and Assayas does his best to communicate a wry skepticism toward his backdrops; Putin haunts his own boardrooms and offices like a Bond villain. Typically one of the most agile filmmakers around, Assayas only occasionally seems to lose his bearings while navigating the corridors of state power, largely because he’s covering a lot of ground. Even at 136 minutes, the film has to move quickly to accommodate the rollicking, globe-trotting plot. On the one hand, the speediness of the storytelling risks reducing significant events—like the possible false-flag bombings in Moscow used to shore up support for the Second Chechen War—to Wikipedia-thin plot points; on the other, it reinforces the idea of Baranov as an entertainer slinging tidy, crowd-pleasing narratives. He’s a master of playing both sides against the middle; he even stage-manages leather-clad radicals who play his own private pet dissenters. By the time he’s laying out his plan to use the Sochi Olympic opening ceremonies as a time-traveling victory lap through Russian culture, he’s become an embodiment of the idea that history is not only written by the winners, but also redacted, dumbed-down, and punctuated with exclamation points. Baranov calls his proposed show the “apotheosis of kitsch”; his shamelessness is not a black mark but a badge of honor. The line might also be a skeleton key unlocking Assayas’s own strategy here: deluxe, slightly stilted geopolitical kitsch doubling as satirical commentary on its own existence.
It’s surely intentional that Law’s Putin barely develops over the course of the story: His almost cryogenic quality of physical and behavioral stasis is a by-product of the same malignant narcissism that propels his policies. What’s trickier, and more important, to reconcile is the terrifically accomplished, increasingly enervating redundancy of Dano’s performance, which grows stiffer as Baranov ages into complacency. His hollowed-out delivery is a feat in and of itself; it either reflects Baranov’s descent into a downward spiral of well-spoken sophistry—“politics is the only game worth playing,” he drones, as if on sinister autopilot—or a filmmaker and his star drawing a blank and calling it portraiture.
That cipherlike quality makes sense insofar as Baranov is a vaporous, abstract presence in a movie that strives for tactile, ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity: the Adman Who Isn’t There. In this way, The Wizard of the Kremlin works as a less grabby and more rewarding study than a biopic like Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024), which tried to earnestly psychologize Donald Trump’s Daddy issues and ended up playing—at least in stretches—like a po-faced Saturday Night Live sketch. Assayas doesn’t pretend to fully understand his antihero, much less to know better than him, and cultivates just enough bewildered distance in the process to give his film the sort of mystic-slash-metaphysical frisson promised by its title.
He also alters the novel’s ending in a way that honors its exquisite bleakness while carving out a thin, jagged sliver of poetic justice. In the book, Baranov is resigned to a frosty exile, surveying the wreckage he helped to create (“there will still be something, but it won’t be humanity”). The movie provides a more decisive conclusion. The epilogue fuses ruthlessness and mercy, offering a sinister wizard a way out of his own private Oz; Assayas’s literal parting shot raises larger questions about crime, punishment, and who gets to play executioner.
