When Jude Law first appeared on screen as Vladimir Putin – hairline shorn, jaw set, eyes narrowed into that familiar KGB stillness – the image was simultaneously absurd and chilling. Here was Britain’s quintessential romantic lead, the golden boy of The Talented Mr Ripley, transfigured into Russia’s stoic helmsman. But the discomfort of watching Law-as-Putin is precisely the point. The Wizard of the Kremlin, directed by Olivier Assayas and co-written with Emmanuel Carrère, is not a biopic. It is a mirror held up to the machinery of modern power – and what it reflects is that the engine of 21st-century authoritarianism was built not by soldiers, but by a reality television producer and an avant-garde theatre enthusiast.
The Novel That Forced Europe to Look
The film arrives adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 debut novel Le Mage du Kremlin, which became a sensation across Europe before its English-language publication by Other Press in 2023 and Pushkin Press paperback in January 2025. Da Empoli, an Italian-Swiss political scientist who served as a senior advisor to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and teaches at Sciences Po Paris, structured the book as a fictional confession: a retired spin doctor named Vadim Baranov, once the unseen architect of Vladimir Putin’s rise, narrates his story to an unnamed interlocutor one night in Moscow. The character is transparently modelled on Vladislav Surkov – the half-Chechen politician, former Khodorkovsky associate, and self-styled intellectual who served as Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration from 1999 to 2011 and was widely known as the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal.”
Surkov’s real legacy is formidable. He coined the doctrine of “sovereign democracy” in a February 2006 speech to United Russia activists, articulating a political model in which the forms of democracy – elections, parties, parliamentary debate – are preserved as spectacle while their substance is hollowed out. “An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state,” Surkov told the Financial Times in a rare 2021 interview, his first since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was among the first eleven Russian officials sanctioned by the United States in March 2014 following the Crimean annexation. Da Empoli’s novel, which won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, translated this shadowy figure’s methods into fiction – fake NGOs, cloned opposition parties, the deliberate blurring of news and propaganda – with what the Financial Times called “a captivating” and “authoritative” portrait of cold-blooded power.
The book’s critical insight is that Surkov’s methods were borrowed from the culture industry. Before entering the Kremlin, Baranov (like Surkov) produced reality television and avant-garde theatre. He understood that audiences do not want to be convinced; they want to be entertained. Politics, in this framework, is not persuasion but performance – a lesson the West has been slow to learn about its own democratic systems.
Assayas and the French Auteur Problem
Olivier Assayas, born in Paris in 1955, is an unlikely choice for a political thriller about Russian power. The son of French screenwriter Jacques Rémy, Assayas built his reputation as a Cahiers du Cinéma critic before directing films that ranged from the Hong Kong action-influenced Irma Vep (1996) to the Cannes Best Director-winning Personal Shopper (2016). His filmography is defined by an interest in systems of control – corporate globalisation in Demonlover (2002), artistic identity in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), the surveillance state in Wasp Network (2019) – but always filtered through psychological intimacy rather than geopolitical exposition.
With The Wizard of the Kremlin, Assayas and Carrère faced a structural challenge: how to dramatise twenty years of post-Soviet political history without reducing it to a Wikipedia summary. Their solution was to anchor the narrative in Baranov – played by Paul Dano with studied restraint – rather than in Putin himself. Dano’s Baranov morphs from a young Moscow artist in the early 1990s into the regime’s indispensable propagandist, and the film tracks his gradual moral corrosion as he shapes the image of a “rising KGB officer” whom Law plays with what Roger Ebert‘s Glenn Kenny called “a near-permanent grimace and barely ever raising his voice.”
The casting of Law announced in January 2025, with principal photography taking place in Riga, Latvia, that March – a brisk five-month turnaround before the Venice premiere – drew both fascination and protest. Ukrainian groups objected to what they perceived as the film’s “bothsidesism”; Russian state media dismissed it as British propaganda. Law himself told Deadline in January 2025 that the role felt like “scaling Everest,” adding: “At the moment it looks like an Everest to climb, so I’m in the foothills looking up thinking, ‘Oh Christ, what have I said?'” At the Venice press conference in August 2025, he was more measured: “Olivier and I discussed that this wasn’t to be an impersonation of Putin and he didn’t want me to hide behind a mask of prosthetics.” Law learned judo for the role and used his natural voice rather than a Russian accent, relying on wigs and period-accurate costuming – including Zegna suits, a known Putin favourite – to establish the character.
The 1990s as Crucible
The film’s most arresting sequences – and the territory explored in our analysis of the West’s Russian obsession – are set not in the corridors of post-2000 Kremlin power but in the chaotic glamour of 1990s Moscow. Assayas recreates the period as a carnival of oligarchic excess – cocaine-fuelled parties, Versace-clad billionaires, and the spectacle of Boris Yeltsin literally being tied to a wooden chair to prevent him from collapsing during a televised address. These scenes, shot in Riga’s art nouveau quarter, aim for what producer Charles Gillibert called “Wolf Hall with Uzis”: a Shakespearean power struggle set amid post-Soviet decay.
The wardrobe semiotics tell the story. Baranov wears the clothes of an aspiring bohemian; his eventual patron, the Berezovsky analogue played by Will Keen, arrives in Brioni and puffing Cohibas. When Baranov first meets Law’s Putin at a swank restaurant, the future president ignores the elaborate menu and orders a bowl of kasha. “Two,” Baranov says. The moment crystallises the film’s central argument: that Putin’s appeal – to the Russian public and to operators like Baranov – was not ideological but temperamental. He represented discipline in a society drowning in chaos.
Da Empoli understood this dynamic intimately. In the novel, Baranov articulates the seduction: “Russians had grown up in the countryside and suddenly found themselves in a supermarket.” The freedom of the 1990s was experienced not as liberation but as vertigo. Surkov’s genius, and Baranov’s, was to channel that disorientation into a political project – not restoring communism but manufacturing a new mythology in which the state’s power was presented as natural, inevitable, and Russian.
Assayas frames this not as exotic foreign pathology but as a cautionary tale for the West. “The film is very much about how modern politics, 21st-century politics, were invented,” he told the Venice press conference. “And part of that brought the power of Vladimir Putin in Russia, so we made a movie about what politics has become and the very scary and dangerous situation we all feel we are in. We took a case, which was the specific story of Vladimir Putin, but I think it applies to a lot of leaders.”
Critical Fault Lines
The film’s critical reception has been divided in ways that mirror its thematic tensions. On Rotten Tomatoes, 44 per cent of 118 critics gave positive reviews (the score has shifted from an initial 52% among the first 44 Venice reviews), while Metacritic assigned a score of 54 out of 100 – “mixed or average.” David Sims, writing in The Atlantic, praised Law’s performance as “extraordinary,” noting that “wearing a near-permanent grimace and barely ever raising his voice, he’s a nonetheless transfixing screen presence.” John Powers at NPR called it “not merely juicy but revelatory.” But Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian found the adaptation “exasperatingly laborious and literal-minded, burdened with endless dull voiceover,” while IndieWire graded it a C+, arguing that “Paul Dano is Putin’s Kingmaker in an Olivier Assayas movie that won’t start a revolution.”
The deeper criticism, voiced by Russian audiences and scholars, concerns the film’s anglophone framing. Russian commentators on IMDb noted that the production’s lack of Russian involvement produced jarring errors: characters say “na zdorovie” (a Polish custom, not Russian), drink tea from a samovar (an anachronism by a century), and half the cast adopts thick fake Russian accents while the other half speaks in native British and American voices. The historical cameos – Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik theatrics, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s biker gang, Khodorkovsky’s arrest – serve as period signifiers rather than fully realised dramatic scenes.
Yet the film’s most provocative choice may be what it omits. The real Surkov is largely absent from the screen; Dano’s Baranov is a composite figure, and Surkov’s theoretical contributions to authoritarianism – his writings on “non-linear war” and “sovereign democracy” – are reduced to oblique references. As the historian Timothy Snyder has argued, “Surkov’s theories on ‘sovereign democracy’ shaped 21st-century authoritarianism. To sideline him for Putin’s ‘strongman’ myth is to miss the point entirely.” This is the paradox at the heart of the project: a film ostensibly about the manufactured nature of political spectacle reproduces, in its own casting and narrative choices, the very spectacle it critiques.
What the Film Actually Reveals
The most penetrating insight in The Wizard of the Kremlin comes not from its dramatic set-pieces but from its quietest observation. Baranov’s trajectory – from artist to propagandist to exile – is presented not as corruption but as seduction. He believes, at each stage, that he is acting in Russia’s interest. His love affair with Ksenia, played by Alicia Vikander with what RogerEbert.com‘s Kenny compared to Deborah Kerr’s turn in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, provides the emotional spine: she represents the life he might have led, the artistic integrity he traded for proximity to power.
This is where the film transcends its geopolitical subject. The mechanisms Baranov deploys – the manufactured outrage, the cloned opposition, the blurring of entertainment and information – are not uniquely Russian. They are the grammar of modern political communication, refined in Silicon Valley boardrooms and deployed in elections from Washington to Warsaw. Assayas understands this, which is why he cast American and British actors in roles that might more plausibly have been played by Russians: the film is about us as much as it is about them. It sits alongside a growing body of contemporary cultural work grappling with authoritarian spectacle – from television dramas to stage productions – that asks audiences to examine their own complicity in the systems they claim to reject.
The Wizard of the Kremlin arrives in US and UK cinemas in May 2026, distributed by Vertical Entertainment, at a moment when the questions it raises have never been more urgent. It is not a perfect film – its pacing is deliberate, its voiceover often redundant, its climactic scenes hurried. But it accomplishes something rare in political cinema: it makes the audience uncomfortable not with graphic violence or thriller mechanics, but with recognition. The wizard, it turns out, was never behind a curtain. He was standing in plain sight, producing reality television.
The film’s North American release follows a French box-office success and a Cinema for Peace nomination. For UK audiences, it offers a pointed reminder that the West’s fascination with Putin – the obsession with decoding his bare-chest photos, his judo prowess, his inscrutable silences – has always been a form of projection. We wanted a villain; Surkov gave us a show. Assayas, to his credit, refuses to let us look away from the stagecraft.
