When the first set photographs of Jude Law as Vladimir Putin emerged from the cobbled streets of Riga in March 2025, the reaction was visceral. Here was Britain’s quintessential romantic lead – the golden boy of The Talented Mr Ripley – transformed into Russia’s stoic helmsman: hairline receding, jaw set with KGB steel, eyes narrowed into an inscrutable gaze. The project was The Wizard of the Kremlin, the latest film from French auteur Olivier Assayas, adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s acclaimed 2022 novel. Nearly a year after its Venice Film Festival competition premiere, the film has arrived in UK cinemas via Signature Entertainment on 17 April 2026 – and it remains as provocative as it is polarising.
From Heartthrob to Head of State
Law’s casting as Putin – a role he has compared to “scaling Everest” – initially baffled critics and audiences alike. The actor’s repertoire leans toward tortured intellectuals and romantic leads rather than icy tacticians. Yet Assayas’ vision hinges on precisely this dissonance. His Putin is not the barrel-chested strongman of 2020s propaganda, but a 1990s apparatchik – a bureaucratic climber played, as the director described it to Variety, with “ruthless ambiguity.”
The transformation was meticulous. Law underwent months of preparation, working with dialect coaches and studying footage of Putin obsessively. He became what he later called an “obsessive” watcher of the Russian president’s mannerisms – the coy, heavy-lidded glower, the distinctive pout, the studied stillness. Speaking at the Venice press conference, Law admitted the difficulty: “The hardest thing for me was that the public face we see reveals very, very little. There’s a term for him, and it’s ‘a man without a face.’ There’s a mask.”
What makes Law’s performance distinctive is his refusal to attempt a Russian accent. His Putin speaks with a honeyed English lile – a choice that divided critics but which Assayas defended as deliberately disorienting. The film is not attempting documentary realism. It is a hall of mirrors reflecting Western fantasies about Russian power.
Surkov’s Shadow Play
The film’s true protagonist is not Putin but Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano with a softly-spoken, unnerving cadence entirely of his own invention. Baranov is a fictional character drawn from da Empoli’s novel, inspired by the real Vladislav Surkov – the political technologist widely regarded as the architect of Putin’s “managed democracy” and the concept of “sovereign democracy.”
As the original source article for this piece noted, da Empoli’s novel – hailed by Frédéric Beigbeder as “House of Cards meets Dostoevsky” – uses Baranov to dissect Russia’s transformation from post-Soviet chaos into a tightly controlled political system built on mythmaking and fear. The film’s leaked script, obtained by Le Monde, amplified this metafictional bent: scenes juxtapose Boris Berezovsky’s 2013 London suicide with Surkov’s nihilistic mantra that “politics is the art of destroying reality.”
Dano, speaking at Venice, pushed back against readings that reduced his character to simple villainy: “If you simply called a character like Baranov bad, that would be an enormous oversimplification that does more harm than good.” He added that the “wizard” of the title refers to the person operating in the background – “so there’s a casting of a spell that is happening.”
Assayas’ Shakespearean Ambitions
For Assayas, 70, The Wizard of the Kremlin represents perhaps his most ambitious undertaking since Carlos, his five-and-a-half-hour study of the terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. Speaking to Far Out Magazine, the director placed the project squarely in a tradition of dramatising contemporary power: “I mean, I’m not William Shakespeare, but you know, for the political movies I’ve been making, my inspiration has always been Shakespeare’s political and historical plays. He fictionalised the politicians of his time in many ways.”
Crucially, Assayas insisted on English as the film’s language – not Russian – precisely because this is not a story about Russia alone. “This is not a Russian story. This is universal,” he told Far Out. “It concerns everybody. I could have made the same movie about Brexit or the rise of Trump. So I think English makes that point clear.” The co-writer Emmanuel Carrère, whose mother is Russian, brought deep knowledge of post-Soviet politics to the screenplay, while Assayas focused on the machinery of power itself.
The result, at 136 minutes after Venice trimming, is a deliberate, methodical film. BBC critic Nicholas Barber compared it to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels – “about the quietly wily strategist behind the throne rather than the monarch sitting on it.” Yet critical reception has been sharply divided. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates a 52% positive score across 44 reviews, with Metacritic assigning 54 out of 100, indicating “mixed or average” standing. The Telegraph called it a “meaty political procedural”; The Observer criticised “stodgy pacing.”
The Authenticity Question
One persistent criticism concerns the film’s depiction of Russian culture itself. On IMDb, a Russian reviewer complained that “there were very few Russians involved in the production,” noting that set designs, costumes, and even speech patterns felt inauthentic. Characters say “na zdorovie” when drinking – “Polish people do that,” the reviewer noted – while a samovar appears despite not being common for “the past two centuries.” Half the cast adopted thick Russian accents; the other half spoke in native British or American English.
This tension between authenticity and allegory runs through the entire production. The film was shot in Riga, Latvia – a stand-in for Moscow that also served as a pragmatic necessity, since filming in Russia was, as Assayas admitted to Metrograph, “never on the table, really.” Costume designer Jürgen Doering dressed Law in 1999-era Zegna suits – actual favourites of the real Putin – and a Seiko watch, nods to judo practicality over oligarchic excess. But these details sit uneasily alongside broader creative liberties.
Assayas was sanguine about the trade-offs. Speaking to Metrograph ahead of the US premiere, he confessed that the anxiety of showing his work never diminishes: “I don’t know what the film is until I’ve screened it, until it has been seen by a full house. It’s extremely intimidating.”
What the Film Reveals About Western Obsession
The Wizard of the Kremlin arrived at a fraught moment. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now into its fourth year, has made any sympathetic or nuanced portrayal of Putin’s inner circle a political act. Ukrainian groups protested the film’s screening at Venice, accusing it of “bothsidesism.” Russian state media decried it as “British propaganda.”
Yet the film’s real provocation may be what it reveals about Western audiences’ appetite for understanding – rather than merely condemning – authoritarian power. As actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays an American journalist interviewing Baranov, argued at Venice: “Even within the time frame of the original sins of America…we had an idea that we could be better. This idea that we could aspire toward some sort of utopian perfectibility. If that is lost, as it is now, then we become what we see in this film.”
The box office tells its own story: $6.8 million worldwide against a reported €23 million budget. A commercial disappointment by conventional metrics, yet a film that has ignited exactly the conversations Assayas intended. As the earlier Creativity’s UK analysis explored, the West’s fascination with Putin and his circle – Surkov, Berezovsky, the oligarchs – says as much about European democratic anxieties as it does about Russian ambition.
Beyond the Kremlin Walls
Da Empoli himself, a former advisor to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, has acknowledged that the novel’s power derives not from insider knowledge – he visited Russia approximately three times – but from an understanding of political machinery that transcends borders. “He is so romantic that he freed me and pushed me to become a novelist,” da Empoli said of Surkov, whom he has never met in person.
This universality is both the film’s greatest strength and its most persistent vulnerability. By refusing to pin the story to a single nation’s experience, Assayas risks satisfying no one entirely. But he also achieves something rarer: a film that functions as a diagnostic tool for understanding how 21st-century populism was engineered – not in Moscow, but everywhere.
As Assayas told the BBC at Venice: “It isn’t just about the birth of today’s Russia. It’s about the birth of today’s world.”
The Wizard of the Kremlin is in UK and Irish cinemas now, distributed by Signature Entertainment.
