Power and storytelling have always danced together like a pair of well-dressed conspirators: one whispers, the other commands.
From this duet have sprung triumphant leaders and trampled nations, empires built as much on rhetoric as on steel. Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel and unveiled in competition at Venice, slips us behind the velvet curtain of this choreography.
Its master of ceremonies is Vadim Baranov, a fictional spin doctor modeled on Vladislav Surkov, and embodied by Paul Dano with the cool precision of a chess player who has long since stopped caring whether the pieces are ivory or bone.
Dano’s Baranov is a creature of exquisite detachment, a near-sociopath who observes Russia’s spiraling theatrics with the faint amusement of a man watching an elaborate stage farce he himself scripted.
His rare flickers of warmth are reserved for Alicia Vikander’s luminous intellectual-turned-oligarch, whose discovery that luxury can be a philosophy in itself provides the film with a sly, champagne-dry irony.
Around them hovers Jeffrey Wright’s inquisitive American journalist, mostly unseen, like a persistent conscience the film politely declines to acknowledge.
Opposite Dano, Jude Law’s Putin is rendered with chilling elegance: a man intoxicated by power yet prickly as a monarch denied a proper bow.
Law captures the paradox of a ruler who hoards authority like a dragon its gold, yet seems curiously untouched by ordinary feeling.
The performances are magnetic, and Assayas orchestrates them with a craftsman’s assurance.
One occasionally wishes the story had the spaciousness of a grand limited series—the film hurtles through epochal events (the Kursk disaster, the Orange Revolution, Crimea) with the brisk efficiency of a history lesson delivered by a particularly stylish professor—but there is a certain bravura in this compression, a sense of history sprinting to keep up with its own myth.
Visually, the film is a feast.
François-Renaud Labarthe’s production design and Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography bathe the narrative in a polished, glacial beauty that mirrors its emotional climate.
Assayas peppers the film with epigrammatic barbs—“There’s no bloodier dictator than the people”—that land like elegant darts.
If the tone sometimes drifts toward deliberate coolness, it is a coolness worn like couture: immaculate, intentional, and faintly provocative.
Referencing Zamyatin’s We, the film toys with the idea of man as an unread novel.
And while Baranov may seem less a mystery than a meticulously solved equation, watching him is a rare pleasure: a study in power as performance, delivered with wit, intelligence, and a glint of wicked amusement.
By Giulia Dobre
Paris, Febr.6th 2026.
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