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.
Full analysis below
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The Wizard of the Kremlin does not qualify as a woke trap under VVWS v1.1. The film carries a positive margin (+3.04 TRAD), which means the woke trap criterion, a negative margin with ideological content hidden until more than 50% of runtime, does not apply. The film's ideological complexity is apparent from its premise and promotional materials. American audiences can research the source novel and the director's filmography before buying a ticket. The TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict reflects genuine tension between the film's anti-totalitarian core, which is recognizably conservative, and the Western liberal globalist framing its French filmmakers bring to the material.
Our Verdict on 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.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
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
Director: Olivier Assayas
MIXED LEANING WOKE. Assayas is a French filmmaker from the generation that made its name at Cahiers du Cinema and in the European art-house tradition. He is not a propagandist and his films are rarely simple political tracts. His best work, Irma Vep (1996), Clean (2004), Carlos (2010), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Personal Shopper (2016), operates in a register of ambiguity and intellectual exploration rather than ideological instruction. However, his political assumptions are those of the French intellectual left: a deep suspicion of nationalism, an identification with liberal cosmopolitanism, and a reading of Russian history in which the failure to embrace Western liberal values is the root cause of Putin's rise. These assumptions shape what he notices and what he doesn't. The film is not propaganda. But it is politics.Assayas began writing for Cahiers du Cinema in the early 1980s and has directed films across multiple decades and genres. His 2010 miniseries Carlos, a biographical account of the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, showed he could handle sprawling geopolitical material with intelligence and visual ambition. The Wizard of the Kremlin is his most direct engagement with contemporary political history. Co-writing with Emmanuel Carrere, one of France's most prominent literary journalists and essayists, brings additional intellectual weight and additional ideological consistency. Both men are products of the Parisian intellectual tradition that treated the fall of the Soviet Union not as a conservative victory but as a complicated moment that revealed the fragility of all political systems.
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
The film's most interesting contribution to political thinking is its depiction of what Baranov does: he turns Russia's political space into theater. In his system, opposing parties are funded by the Kremlin. Elections are managed spectacles. The appearance of democracy exists precisely so that real democracy cannot. This is Vladislav Surkov's actual project, documented in multiple serious accounts of Putin's rule. The film makes this argument visually and dramatically in ways that a policy paper cannot. For adult viewers interested in understanding how contemporary authoritarianism operates, not just in Russia but as a model for governance, The Wizard of the Kremlin is genuinely instructive. The French progressive framing does not undermine the accuracy of the analysis. It just shapes which conclusions are drawn from it.
Parental Guidance
Rated R for language, mature thematic content, and brief violence. The Wizard of the Kremlin is a sophisticated political drama for adult viewers. The mature content is primarily intellectual: the mechanics of propaganda, the moral compromises of power, the self-deception of intelligent people who know what they are enabling. Brief political violence is depicted but is not the film's focus. Adult viewers interested in understanding how authoritarian systems work will find this worthwhile.
Is The Wizard of the Kremlin Safe for Kids?
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