When The Wizard of the Kremlin received a ten-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival on 31 August 2025, the audience was not cheering Vladimir Putin. They were cheering Jude Law – the English actor from Southwark who had transformed himself, with prosthetics and discipline, into the most scrutinised leader of the twenty-first century. Alicia Vikander wiped away tears. Olivier Assayas climbed over seats to embrace his cast. The moment was electric, but it was also deeply strange: a room full of cinephiles applauding a fictional autocrat, performed by a man whose career had been defined by Romantic leads and period charm. The dissonance was the point. Assayas had made a film not about Russia, but about the West’s compulsion to look at Russia – and to see itself reflected back.
The Novel That Lit the Fuse
The film originates in Giuliano da Empoli’s debut novel Le Mage du Kremlin, published in France by Éditions Gallimard in April 2022, just weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Da Empoli, a Swiss-Italian political scientist and former senior advisor to Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, had originally intended to include his central figure in a non-fiction work, The Engineers of Chaos (2019), which profiled populist strategists including Steve Bannon. But the character of Vladislav Surkov – Putin’s longtime spin doctor, the man who coined “sovereign democracy” and “non-linear warfare” – proved too compelling for essay form. “He is so romantic that he freed me and pushed me to become a novelist,” da Empoli told Corriere della Sera. The novel sold over 650,000 copies in France alone and won the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française.
The English translation, by Willard Wood and published by Other Press in November 2023, was named a Best Book of the Year by both the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Its premise is elegant: a fictional Kremlin insider named Vadim Baranov – recognisably Surkov, but with altered biographical details – spends a single night at his dacha outside Moscow recounting his life to an unnamed narrator. The conceit allows da Empoli to dramatise three decades of Russian political history – from the collapse of the USSR through the Chechen wars, the oligarch era, and the annexation of Crimea – as a personal confession rather than a textbook survey.
What gives the novel its sting is the portrait of Baranov as an aesthete who treats politics as performance art. His genius, modelled on Surkov’s real trajectory, was to apply theatrical thinking to statecraft: staging reality rather than governing it. As Peter Pomerantsev argued in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), Surkov was the architect of Russia’s post-truth machinery, turning the country into what da Empoli calls “an avant-garde political stage.”
Assayas Takes the Helm
Olivier Assayas, whose career has ranged from Personal Shopper (2016) to the sprawling Carlos (2010), was a natural choice for the adaptation. His previous engagement with political history – particularly Wasp Network (2019), about Cuban intelligence agents in Miami – demonstrated his interest in how ideology shapes individual lives.
Assayas co-wrote the screenplay with Emmanuel Carrère, the novelist whose 2011 biographical work Limonov chronicled the life of the Russian punk-poet turned ultranationalist Eduard Limonov – a figure who appears as a character in the film. “It’s not a film about Putin and his rise to power,” Assayas told Screen International in September 2025. “It’s a thriller that raises questions about contemporary politics. It’s about the new modalities of power and the people who have – and continue to – reinvent politics for our modern era.”
The $20 million production was produced by Curiosa Films and Gaumont. Filming took place in March 2025 in Riga, Latvia, whose art nouveau architecture stood in for Moscow and London. No Western production could film in Russia, but the substitution reinforced the film’s central theme: a city playing the role of another city, just as Baranov plays the role of reality’s director.
Law’s Putin: Petulant, Precise, Uncomfortable
The casting of Jude Law as Putin, announced in January 2025, initially provoked scepticism. His reputation rested on roles as the seductive Tom Ripley, Dr Watson, and the tormented Pope Pius XIII in The Young Pope (2016). He was not an obvious choice for a role demanding stillness, menace, and ideological opacity.
What emerged, according to critics who saw the film at Venice and later in wide release, was a performance of calculated restraint. Jordan Mintzer, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, noted that Law “slips into the role flawlessly… never overdoing it and adding a fair amount of gravitas to the constantly shifting scenery.” Kevin Maher, chief film critic of The Times, called it a portrayal of “a petulant Putin” and said Law “doesn’t fear repercussions” for the boldness of the interpretation. Damon Wise in Deadline observed that Law delivered the character “with an almost entirely uninflected accent, giving nothing away with his pudgy, boyishly round poker face.”
The physical transformation was aided by prosthetics and AI-assisted de-aging technology – Law, born in 1972, played Putin across an age range spanning decades. The costume design, by Anaïs Romand, anchored the performance in material detail: Law wore Zegna suits favoured by the real Putin in the late 1990s and a Seiko watch rather than a luxury timepiece, a nod to Putin’s judo-honed practicality. The visual binary – austere competence versus oligarchic decadence – is one the film exploits throughout.
Assayas himself offered an intriguing aside when asked whether Putin might see the film. “I don’t know if Putin will see it,” he told Screen International. “I don’t think he has time to sit down and watch a French film, although I think it would amuse him to be played by Jude Law.”
What the Critics Found – and What They Missed
The critical reception was polarised. Bilge Ebiri, writing for New York Magazine‘s Vulture, declared the film “great” and praised Assayas’s ability to “conjure the hedonistic world of the immediate post-Soviet years with a few deft strokes.” The BBC’s review acknowledged its value as political education: “The film details how 21st-century populism was developed.”
Others were more guarded. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian found Paul Dano’s Baranov “a one-note, smirking, singsong” presence. Owen Gleiberman in Variety called it “at once absorbing and diffuse… episodic to a fault.” The most persistent criticism concerned structural compression: at 136 minutes, the film attempted to compress thirty years of Russian history into a single arc, functioning more as a political seminar than a character study. Phil de Semlyen in Time Out identified the deeper issue: “It’s unsurprising that a French director and screenwriter adapting a book by a Swiss-Italian author with a cast of Americans, Brits and Swedes, filming in Latvia, struggles to burrow deep into the psyche of one of the world’s most secretive political cultures.”
Da Empoli’s novel succeeded partly because it was intimate – a single night, a single voice, a single dacha. The film spans continents and decades, and its framing device (Jeffrey Wright as an American journalist interviewing the retired Baranov) was widely seen as a narrative shortcut. The irony is that a film about the manipulation of reality relied on one of cinema’s oldest reality-concealing devices: the omniscient narrator.
The Surkov Shadow
Perhaps the most revealing critique came from the historian Timothy Snyder, who argued that sidelining Surkov in favour of Putin missed the point. Da Empoli’s novel understood that Surkov was the ideologue and Putin the instrument – that the architecture of Russian authoritarianism was built by strategists, not strongmen alone. The film, by foregrounding Law’s Putin, risked reinforcing the very “strongman” myth it ostensibly deconstructed.
Western audiences are drawn to Putin precisely because he is legible – a face, a biographical arc from KGB officer to autocrat. Surkov is a concept rather than a persona: the theorist of manufactured reality who told The Guardian that “reality is boring” and that politics should construct something more compelling. To make Surkov the protagonist of a mainstream film would require a cinema willing to dramatise ideas rather than personalities.
Assayas was aware of this. “While making this film I felt I was telling the story of the seed that was planted and has grown into the political world in which we live today,” he told Variety. The metaphor is botanical, not psychological: the film is about an ecosystem, not an individual. But ecosystems are hard to film. Personalities are easy.
The Western Gaze and Its Discontents
The Wizard of the Kremlin arrives at a moment when Western cinema’s engagement with Russia is caught between two impulses: the desire to understand and the habit of simplifying. Recent years have produced notable entries – Serebrennikov’s Limonov: The Ballad (2024), HBO’s Chernobyl (2019), and Peter Morgan’s Patriots on stage. Each grappled with the same fundamental problem: how to render a political system whose defining feature is its opacity.
What distinguishes Assayas’ film is its refusal of easy moral resolution. Baranov is not a conventional villain. He is an aesthete who discovered that politics was the most exciting art form available, and who slowly realised that the art he had helped create was consuming the audience. His retreat to the dacha is not redemption but exhaustion. The film asks us to recognise the logic that drove him – and to notice how familiar that logic has become.
That familiarity is the film’s real subject. Assayas told Variety the film was “not just about the birth of today’s Russia, but the birth of today’s world.” It is a film about the normalisation of political unreality – about how the techniques Surkov pioneered in Moscow have migrated, mutated, and taken root in democracies that once believed themselves immune.
The standing ovation in Venice was for Jude Law’s craft, for Assayas’s ambition, and for a story that still has no ending. But it was also for the discomfort the film produces: the recognition that the West’s obsession with Russian power is not mere fascination with a foreign adversary, but the uneasy awareness that the adversary’s methods have become universal, and that the line between observing manipulation and participating in it has never been thinner.
The Wizard of the Kremlin opens in UK cinemas in 2026 via Gaumont. For further reading on Russia’s cultural influence, see the Putin files and our coverage of the West End’s Patriots.
