The first problem a filmmaker faces when attempting to capture Vladimir Putin on screen is that the Russian president is already a heavily mediated fiction. He is a construct of state television, a projection of national anxieties, and a global icon of inscrutable power. To simply impersonate him is to fall into a trap, reproducing the very myth the Kremlin has spent two decades meticulously crafting. In his latest feature, The Wizard of the Kremlin, the French auteur Olivier Assayas sidesteps this trap entirely. By adapting Giuliano da Empoli’s celebrated 2022 novel of the same name, Assayas delivers not a conventional biographical portrait, but a chilling autopsy of political stagecraft.
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival before receiving its wider North American release in the spring of 2026, the film arrives burdened with immense expectation. It is a work that attempts to translate the opaque machinations of the post-Soviet collapse into the grammar of a prestige geopolitical thriller. Assayas, a filmmaker long preoccupied with the invisible networks of global capital and media – from Demonlover to Carlos – finds in the Kremlin’s engine room his ultimate subject. This is a film about the men who build the reality the rest of the world is forced to inhabit.
The Sorcerer and His Stage
To understand the architecture of modern Russian power, Assayas argues, one must look past the throne to the shadows behind it. The film’s narrative is anchored not by the autocrat himself, but by Vadim Baranov, played with a quiet, terrifying intensity by Paul Dano. Baranov is a fictionalised composite, though he is transparently modelled on Vladislav Surkov, the former avant-garde theatre director who became the Kremlin’s so-called “grey cardinal” and chief ideologist during the 2000s and 2010s.
Dano’s Baranov operates as the audience’s guide through the moral vacuum of the nascent Putin regime. Framing the story as a retrospective confession delivered to an American journalist (Jeffrey Wright), Baranov details his transformation from a cynical television producer to the principal architect of “sovereign democracy.” Dano is remarkable here, stripping away his usual nervous energy to play a man entirely subsumed by his own intellectual detachment. For Baranov, politics is not a matter of policy or public service; it is pure dramaturgy. He views the Russian populace as an audience requiring constant, overwhelming spectacle to distract them from the brutal extraction of their nation’s wealth.
In one of the film’s central sequences, Baranov explains how to manage opposition by funding both the neo-Nazis and the human rights groups, ensuring the state remains the only stable centre in a vortex of manufactured chaos. Dano delivers these lines with the chilly precision of an artist explaining his canvas, perfectly capturing the postmodern nihilism that defines the era. It is a vision of politics where the truth is entirely irrelevant, replaced by a relentless flow of contradictory narratives designed to induce exhaustion and apathy.
The Void at the Centre
If Baranov is the master of ceremonies, who is the lead actor? The casting of Jude Law as Vladimir Putin initially provoked scepticism, appearing on paper as a jarring collision of Hollywood glamour and grim reality. Yet, Law’s performance is a masterclass in calculated restraint. He does not resort to heavy prosthetics or cheap mimicry. Instead, he approaches the role by embodying a profound, unsettling stillness.
Assayas, fully aware of the provocations inherent in his casting choices, told Screen Daily, “I think it would amuse him [Putin] to be played by Jude Law.” Beneath the wry comment lies a serious cinematic strategy. Law, whom Assayas accurately described as “an actor who can transform himself,” plays the Russian leader not as an explosive tyrant, but as a terrifying void. He is a man who absorbs the frantic energy of the oligarchs and operatives around him without yielding anything in return.
In their scenes together, Law and Dano establish a fascinating, unbalanced dynamic. Baranov spins elaborate, avant-garde theories on how to manipulate the West and control the domestic narrative, pitching his ideas with the fervour of a desperate screenwriter. Law’s Putin listens impassively, his eyes deadened, before routinely dismissing the intellectual scaffolding in favour of brute, pre-modern instinct. The film brilliantly captures the tragedy of the intellectual in politics: the spin doctor believes he is controlling the narrative, only to realise that the brute force he helped to package possesses a primal will of its own.
Adapting the Abstract
Translating da Empoli’s text to the screen was a formidable undertaking. The source novel is essentially a philosophical monologue, a dense exploration of political theory masquerading as fiction. Assayas himself admitted to Screen Daily that he was initially hesitant, finding the book “very dialogue-heavy and quite abstract.”
To crack the narrative, Assayas enlisted the help of Emmanuel Carrère as co-writer. Carrère is perhaps the most astute French chronicler of the post-Soviet psyche, having penned the definitive biography of the radical writer Eduard Limonov (a figure who haunts the margins of this film’s universe). Together, Assayas and Carrère have managed to strip away the novel’s heavier didactic elements, transforming the internal monologue into a kinetic, paranoid thriller that aligns perfectly with Creativitys.UK’s coverage of contemporary Film.
The resulting aesthetic is sleek, suffocating, and distinctly modern. The visual language of The Wizard of the Kremlin is dominated by the glow of monitors, the sterile luxury of oligarchs’ yachts, and the cavernous, shadowy halls of state buildings. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux shoots the Kremlin not as a place of historical grandeur, but as a corporate panopticon where every whisper is recorded and every loyalty is transactional. The ensemble cast – including Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, and Will Keen – flesh out this terrifying ecosystem, portraying the various journalists, fixers, and billionaires who are systematically devoured by the machine they helped assemble.
The weight of the subject matter clearly exacted a toll on the production. Speaking to Screen Daily about the filming process, Assayas confessed, “I had the impression every day that I was going to war.” That underlying tension bleeds into every frame of the picture. There is a relentless, claustrophobic dread that mounts as Baranov’s sophisticated public relations strategies pave the way for real-world bloodshed.
The Seed of the Present
The Wizard of the Kremlin functions as a dark origin story for our current geopolitical reality. It attempts to explain how a shattered, humiliated nation in the late 1990s was systematically rebuilt into a revanchist fortress. As Assayas articulated, “It’s not a film about Putin and his rise to power. 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. 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.”
By focusing on the “new modalities of power,” Assayas interrogates a specifically Western failure of imagination. For years, European and American leaders viewed the Kremlin through the lens of rational statecraft, believing that economic integration and diplomatic protocol could tame an essentially irrational force. They assumed that because the Russian elite wore Western suits, bought property in London, and spoke the language of public relations, they shared the same fundamental values. Baranov’s genius, and the film’s central horror, lies in weaponising that very assumption. The trappings of democracy – elections, press conferences, parliamentary debates – were maintained merely as theatrical props, designed to pacify the West while absolute authority was consolidated at home.
The Tragedy of Foreknowledge
Perhaps the most devastating aspect of The Wizard of the Kremlin is where it chooses to end. The narrative concludes shortly before the current, catastrophic war in Ukraine, trapping the film in the tense, unresolved space of a prologue. This temporal boundary gives the entire work a profound, sickening irony. The audience watches the characters manoeuvre, strategise, and congratulate themselves on their tactical brilliance, fully aware of the slaughter that awaits them just beyond the frame.
We know the final act of the play that Baranov helped to write, even if he, at the time, did not. This makes the film not merely a historical drama, but an artefact of a bygone era – a time when it was still possible for Western analysts to view Putin as a strategist to be outmanoeuvred rather than a fundamental threat to the global order. It is a product of the analytical impulse, an attempt to reverse-engineer a catastrophe through the rigour of Literature and cinema.
Yet, Assayas ultimately acknowledges the limits of this analytical impulse. The Wizard of the Kremlin is a brilliant, unsettling meditation on the nature of modern power, demonstrating how a country’s soul can be sold through the manipulation of its narrative. But in its closing moments, as Baranov gazes upon the terrifying monolith he has constructed, the film admits defeat. We search for a key, a psychological insight, or a fatal flaw that will explain the nightmare of the present. Instead, Assayas leaves us with a cold, quiet man at the centre of the storm, one who listened patiently to his sorcerers before proceeding to write his own dark, inexorable script. The film is a masterful portrait of a mystery, but it warns us that some darkness cannot be reasoned away – it can only be survived.
