The Wizard of Kremlin Review: An Irrelevant, Cynical Approach to Vladimir Putin’s Russian 

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Venice coverage. The film opens in theaters on May 15.

In April 2022, two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Italian author and political writer Giuliano da Empoli published a fictionalized account of Vladimir Putin’s ascent as seen through the eyes of his advisor. The Wizard of Kremlin almost immediately became a hit as people were trying to grasp the logic behind Russia’s acts of war, forgetting that it was Putin’s rule that legitimized misinformation as a political practice. Already in 2024, Olivier Assayas was attached to direct a film adaptation of the book, which also ended up being supported by Disney+. So The Wizard of Kremlin became a Golden Lion contender as part of Venice’s Competition line-up, and spearheaded by Paul Dano, who plays the film’s protagonist: Vadim Baranov, a stand-in for Putin’s man in the shadows Vladislav Surkov.

Da Empoli’s book uses an imagined conversation between him and Baranov as a storytelling device. Assayas repeats the trick, giving us a narrator for an entry point. Roland (Jeffrey Wright) is a writer who, much like da Empoli himself, has penned an essay about Baranov and finds himself in the back seat of a car to a mansion outside Moscow. Once there he’s warmly welcomed by Baranov himself: a gallant, soft-spoken gentleman whose turtleneck sweater is pulled up as high as his bookshelves are stacked with classics and avant-garde literature. From the comfort of his home, this so-called “New Rasputin” chronicles a life from childhood throughout the cultural boom of the ’90s and his recruitment into politics, his words materializing into glossy, expansive sequences as per the book.

Whether or not he’s a good narrator is up for discussion. He’s “good” for turns of phrase and linearity, but there is not a single hint of doubt as to his reliability. The intriguing things about an éminence grise are their compromised morals, their slippery rhetoric, and the power trips they enable; all that Baranov gives us is a thorough but very dry, unreflected account. Even the love story between him and punkish-girl-turned-socialite Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) lacks the spark to make us think this guy deserves his warlock nickname. The way Ksenia is written in at opportune moments suggests she’s there to diffuse the masculine tensions––being the only woman in this film is worse than there being no woman at all. Even the one time she tries to call Vadim out on his spinelessness, her words feel empty and her criticism limp, a sad waste of Vikander’s chatoic energy.

Jude Law, however, is truly impressive as Vladimir Putin. He portrays the Russian leader with a perfect face of stone and the exact amount of prosthetics to support his ever-lasting pout that is actually a frown. Like Putin himself, Law distills the whole character in his look: his eyes appear shrunken from the optical illusion of make-up that allows the actor to perform swift, darting movements to mark an important part of conversation, an uncanny double to the real person. Signs of Putin’s pettiness and arrogance ensure Assayas won’t have to worry about the audience confusing the potent draw of Law’s performance with eliciting empathy. In a few stand-out moments, Putin and Baranov seem to cling to each other as lifelines; even if no vulnerability is made visible, we can feel them soften up a little. 

Like Ksenia, the role of Roland is insultingly schematic: puppet-like, this supposed expert remains quiet and useless. In an attempt to be faithful to da Empoli’s book, the film’s whole narrative set-up reveals itself flimsy and unconvincing––it doesn’t take much to realize that a conversation between a political advisor and a political expert could never in a million years be so toothless and dull. Baranov’s stories are full of clichés either spoken by him or parroted by others, about how “no one is ever safe in Russia” or that “if you don’t grab power, power grabs you” or about the “need to invent something, someone new” and how he wants to be “part of” his times, “not a witness.” In dramatizing history, cinema can (and should!) get away with clichés, but––when Russia is at war with Ukraine this very moment––the stakes for Assayas and his team should be higher than your regular historical thriller. 

Why fiction? It seems nobody asked this question. Maybe it was deemed unworthy of consideration. Adam Curtis’s 2022 documentary Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone did so much of what The Wizard of Kremlin––a palatable, over-explained slice of history––is spoon-feeding viewers. Because the latter aims to be a genre film, it wears its fiction like a badge of honor. Baranov’s occasional reluctance is carefully inserted into a few scenes where he tries consulting Putin, but the film ultimately faces the same dilemma as all of its kind do: does it favor character empathy over moral convictions? Audiences resisted Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice because they feared the idea of Donald Trump being a movie’s protagonist, but never in its runtime does The Wizard of Kremlin show any ambivalence towards its main character. Without daring to question Baranov as a narrator, Assayas’ film consents to be interpreted as cynical. Because what is it, if not cynical, to insist on turning a chain of events that are still unfolding into a compact story? We may be used to recognizing films that fetishize something through their form, but we seemingly need to be wary of a content-fetish too.

The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.