The Wizard of the Kremlin

The Wizard of the Kremlin opens in the United States on May 15 after premiering at Venice in August 2025 and opening in France in January 2026. American audiences are receiving it nine months into its European life, with a mixed-to-positive critical record already established.

The premise is based on Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 novel, which draws on the real story of Vladislav Surkov, the theater director turned Kremlin ideologist who became the architect of Putin's propaganda state. Da Empoli's fictional version is Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano. The film follows Baranov from the early 1990s chaos of post-Soviet Russia through his rise to influence in Putin's inner circle, depicting along the way the construction of a propaganda apparatus designed to make authoritarian control feel like legitimate governance.

Jude Law plays Putin, and this casting is the film's most audacious decision. Law's Putin is not a cartoon villain. He is charming, methodical, intelligent, and seductive in the way that makes him useful to Baranov as a patron and dangerous to everyone around him. Assayas and Carrere are clearly interested in making authoritarianism comprehensible rather than simply condemnable. That is intellectually honest and also somewhat disquieting depending on how the film resolves the question of Baranov's complicity.

For American audiences, the film's most interesting dimension is its anti-totalitarian core. The depiction of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia as a society built on institutional lies, where truth is a weapon controlled by the state rather than a shared reality that constrains the state, is not a politically neutral observation. Edmund Burke understood this. Solzhenitsyn understood this. The film is in good conservative company when it argues that propaganda is evil because it destroys the shared reality that makes genuine community possible.

Where the film gets complicated is in its framing of who the enemy is. Assayas and Carrere are French intellectuals. Their reading of Russian authoritarianism frames it primarily as the failure of liberalism rather than the success of a competing tradition. Putin is bad, in their telling, because he rejected the post-Soviet liberal opening. The film can't quite imagine a Russia that might have found a legitimate path that was neither Soviet communism nor Western liberal democracy. Nationalism, in the film's logic, is always a path to autocracy. Traditional Russia is always a mask for oppression.

This is not an unreasonable reading of Russian history. But it is a reading that comes with assumptions that conservative American viewers will notice. The film's sympathetic protagonist is a liberal idealist. The film's tragedy is the corruption of his liberalism. The film mourns the Russia that might have been, which is always defined as the Russia that might have been more like France or Germany.

None of this makes the film dishonest. Baranov's fall is genuinely depicted as tragic. The film takes seriously the question of how a person who knows what he's building can keep building it anyway. Paul Dano is very good at playing this kind of internal compromise, and the role suits his particular register of intellectual suffering.

The 136-minute runtime demands patience from audiences. Assayas is not making a thriller. He is making a novel-length political meditation on how idealism curdles into complicity. Some sequences, particularly in the first hour, feel like the film is still finding its focus. The Venice premiere earned mixed reviews for exactly this reason. The film's intelligence is not in question. Its discipline is.

For VirtueVigil readers: the film scores TRADITIONAL LEAN. It is worth watching for its anti-totalitarian argument, for Paul Dano's performance, and for Jude Law's unsettling portrait of how power works on a person who has always wanted it. The ideological lens is French progressive. The underlying argument, that propaganda destroys truth and truth is not a plaything, is one that conservatives and liberals share. The margin between where the film lands and where a purely traditional film would land is the difference between who holds the torch and what it illuminates.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Western liberal globalist ideological lens	3	High	High	3.78
Nationalism conflated with authoritarianism	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Liberal intellectual as sympathetic audience surrogate	2	Moderate	Moderate	2
TOTAL WOKE				7.9

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Totalitarianism depicted as fundamentally evil and destructive	4	High	High	5.04
Propaganda as moral evil	3	High	High	3.78
Consequences of moral compromise	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				10.9

Score Margin: +3 TRAD