‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Review: Jude Law’s Whiny Putin is Rare Highlight of Olivier Assayas’s Messy, Bloated Russia Drama [C+] Venice

The French director adapts an award-winning French novel about a fictional adviser to Vladimir Putin – to underwhelming results

Most of what’s good in The Wizard of the Kremlin, Olivier Assayas’ attempt to distill the essence of the Putin era in two and a half hours, comes early on. Fictional shadowy adviser Vadym Baranov (Paul Dano) begins life as a theatre student adapting the classic Zamyatin novel We, a dystopian tale about dictatorship, for the stage. Zamyatin’s book inspired Orwell to write 1984 and made him an enemy of Stalin, who banned its publication. Zamyatov is how an American biographer (played by Jeffrey Wright) inadvertently finds his way to Baranov, now retired from politics. He tells his story through the lens of what Zamyatin was right about – and unwise to express. Baranov tells his American guest: “Zamyatin understood too much too quickly and made the rash decision to write about it.”

That is a good enough insight into Baranov’s approach and the Putin playbook in general. There’s no naivety about the cynicism of dictatorship, assassinations, wars, using the constitution to your own ends, centralising power, losing all sight of why you’re there in the first place. Zamyatin, rather, has plenty to teach dictators. The urgency to Make Russia Great Again simply justifies the means.

Baranov soon switches teams from a student of dystopia to an instigator of it. That’s to the disappointment of his girlfriend Ksenia (Alicia Vikander). She leaves him for an oligarch and a former friend of Baranov’s. Power in a post-Cold War Russia, Baranov realises, isn’t knowledge. It’s the accumulation of resources as they come cascading down from state ownership. The person who understands this best, and is thus the wealthiest, is Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who owns the TV station Baranov works at. Berezovsky is a ruthless oligarch working hard to prop up an ailing Yeltsin and prevent Russia falling back into Communist hands. His next project is the young head of the FSB, the KGB’s more ruthless and effective successor, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Jude Law).

Putin has no interest in the cheap showbusiness of politics (at least not yet) and is dubious he is the right person to oversee Russia’s transition from one complacent puppet leader to another. But it’s Baranov’s vision of what he calls “vertical politics” and the restoration of “the power of the father over the power of the mother” that piques Putin’s interest and makes him realise he may be able to play a role in restoring his once-great nation. Putin and Baranov both see through Berezovsky’s transparent short-term needs; like dictatorship, the oligarchs are merely a means to an end. They become the core of the new Kremlin – Putin the king and Baranov his loyal and able wizard.

This setup is a compelling story well told by Assayas, with zippy dialogue, short scenes and well-placed archive footage that reminds us how surreal, and dark, all this is. Whether it’s the charred remains of Berezovsky’s chauffeur in his car after a failed assaination attempt, the rubble after the 1990s Moscow bombings which helped propel Putin to power (and have been widely analysed as a false-flag attack), or the doomed Kursk submarine whose sinking proved the first real challenge to Putin’s model of power, Assayas is keen to remind us that though some of his characters here are fictional, their world is dead real. 

Unless you’re a Russia expert, The Wizard of the Kremlin will teach you plenty. But it probably won’t move you. It’s a whistle stop tour of Putin’s making without much heart. Baranov’s relationship with Ksenia is awkward, sometimes intended in Dano and Vikander’s performances, but more often not. The emotional centre of the story doesn’t really exist. Assayas’s argument may be that Putin’s Russia is so devoid of warmth that there isn’t a heart to find. But when it tries, such as in Baranov and Ksenia’s relationship or in its depiction of Berezovsky as an exiled has-been, it fails.

Jude Law as Putin adds a useful chaos and, occasionally, comedy to affairs. He is attempting a commanding performance as one of the world’s great enigmas – someone nicknamed “the man with no face”. But Law so often leans on Putin’s signature dissatisfied pout to the point that it gets boring. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go much beyond an impression.

The Wizard of the Kremlin doesn’t feel as long as its two and a half hour runtime, with an episodic structure including titles like “THE END OF THE OLIGARCHS” and “THE WAR IN CRIMEA” that keeps proceedings at pace. But it spreads itself too thinly, over too long a period and focused on too broad an ensemble. It has plenty of facts among the fiction, but is fatally lacking in the emotional core to keep us interested in our characters. A more informative telling of the Yeltsin-Putin transition is Vitaly Mansky’s 2018 documentary Putin’s Witnesses, which includes striking access to all the key players. But The Wizard of the Kremlin can only touch the surface.

Grade: C+

This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival where The Wizard of the Kremlin had its world premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.

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Adam Solomons

Adam Solomons is a critic and journalist who combines his love of cinema with an insatiable hunger for news and politics. Day-to-day he’s a producer at Times Radio, with The Times of London. Adam is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic with bylines at Sight & Sound, Indiewire, and more. His favorite movie is still Toy Story 2.

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