The Wizard of the Kremlin

Olivier Assayas – 2025

I think I’m safe in believing that anyone to decides to watch The Wizard of the Kremlin is interested in seeing a compelling story about the intrigues and power struggles leading to Putin’s rise to power. Anyone hoping for a real-life House of Cards (British version), a modern-dress Macbeth or Julius Caesar, or even a brutally black comedy like W. or The Death of Stalin can just check their hopes at the door. The decision to wrap the story around the biography – told in lethargic voiceovers – of a lazily idealistic playwright who becomes Putin’s media advisor, a fictionalized version of Vladislav Surkov – could only have been made by one of the dullest directors in the world, Olivier Assayas, who seems to be actively trying to bore his own audience to death. Only Assayas could manage to sand down the talents of actors like Jude Law, Jefffrey Wright and Paul Dano to make them come off like amateurs. He probably gave them some lecture about the need to shed “all that Hollywood BS” without ever admitting that he was pranking them along with the future imagined audience. Law makes a good-faith effort to inhabit the skin of Putin, but Assayas makes a fool of him, turning the film into a two-and-a-half-hour comedy sketch but without a single laugh. While some of the cast speak English with a Russian accent, for some reason Dano adopts a sleep-inducing mid-Atlantic(?) accent even though surely he’s talented enough to do an appropriate dialect if he’d been allowed. The Dano character’s story is pitifully uninteresting in every way. He’s neither a dilletante nor a scoundrel, nor ambitious enough to sustain such attention. He’s not exactly a pawn of history but he has no arc that commands interest either. The film’s flashback structure robs its story of any suspense and momentum, and the bland, TV-drama cinematography has the effect of making you want to do chores while letting it continue to play in the background, since it frequently reassures you that you’re not likely to miss anything too important. As long as you gather that all of this is pointing towards Putin becoming the permanent dictator of Russia, you don’t need to pay close attention. Whether you faithfully hang on every word or just drift in once in a while, the result is exactly the same, a feeling of lethargy and dissatisfaction. Kudos to the reliable Assayas. It’s not a simple thing to make a film this unsatisfying. It takes concentrated effort.