‘The Wizard Of The Kremlin’ review: Jude Law impresses as Vladimir Putin in Oliver Assayas drama

Dir. Olivier Assayas. France. 2025. 156mins

Olivier Assayas’s English-language The Wizard of the Kremlin is undeniably compelling – and how could it not be, given that it tells one of the most fascinating stories in recent world history? Indirectly an account of the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, it also recounts the Faustian apprenticeship of his resident strategist; here named Vadim Baranov and played by Paul Dano. The film’s main drawback is that the dense narrative is over-dependent on dialogue and exposition – historical, political, philosophical.

Never quite comes to life as a character sketch

Following his modern-history dramas Carlos (2010) and Wasp Network (2019), French cosmopolitan Assayas is very much in his element adapting Giuliano da Empoli’s best-selling 2022 roman à clef, recreating 1990s and 2000s Russia with panache and detail. There are also some striking performances, not least from Jude Law as Putin, although Dano can be distractingly mannered. As a flamboyant corridors-of-power drama, The Wizard casts its spell imposingly – but often in functionally informative docudrama fashion. This particular mix should make for upmarket niche exposure following its Venice competition premiere, while likely limiting its appeal to Assayas’s usual cinephile following.

Assayas’s screenplay collaborator is writer/film-maker Emmanuel Carrère (Between Two Worlds), a long-time documenter of Russia’s turbulent metamorphoses. An opening caption announces that the film is ’an original work of fiction’, but, like da Empoli’s novel, it is manifestly an indirect portrait of Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s adviser for two decades, who has been called ’the architect of the Russian political system.’ Here, named Vadim Baranov, he is first presented by the film’s narrator (Jeffrey Wright) as a man whose disappearance from power has only made him more transfixing a legend. 

The action begins in 2019, with Wright as an American writer in Russia to research a book on Evgeny Zamyatin, whose 1920s novel We presciently anatomised totalitarian power. He finds himself summoned to the country dacha of Baranov, a Zamyatin fan, who tells him his own story in detail. It begins in the post-glasnost years when Russian society, youth especially, found new freedom – a heady period epitomised by a riotous avant-punk party, where the still-gauche Baranov meets Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), an enigmatic, cynical wild child first seen performing a rock-dominatrix routine.

They become lovers – although she later leaves him for flashy entrepreneur Dmitri Sidorov (a charismatically swaggering Tom Sturridge, in a role drawing on real-life oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Baranov, meanwhile, progresses from avant-garde theatre to trashy TV (key rule: don’t be boring). He then becomes right-hand man to TV magnate Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), whose media manipulations kept doddery premier Boris Yeltsin in power. But a new man is needed in the Kremlin, not least to maintain Berezovsky’s own power, so he and Baranov approach FSB head Vladimir Putin (Law) to be their puppet candidate. Initially playing reluctant, Putin accepts the role – but instantly shows that he’s no-one’s stooge.

For a long time, it isn’t entirely clear where Baranov’s wizardry lies – although he’s an ice-cool customer unafraid to speak truth to power. Later, though, he recruits of multiple conflicting oddball factions – like an extremist biker gang and the ‘National Bolshevik Party’ led by literary star Eduard Limonov, all of them becoming a manipulable ‘official opposition’. He also creates Russia’s ‘troll farm’ cyber-strategy to keep the West permanently confused. 

A screenplay dense with incident and ideological discussion is carried efficiently by fast-moving, sleek direction and sumptuous mise en scene that catches the tone of a changing society and its sudden explosion of capitalist excess. Yet it never quite comes to life as a character sketch – although Dano successfully depicts Baranov’s arc from young counter-culturist to pampered bureaucrat drunk on his own smarts. Dano’s performance can be likeably vulnerable as well as demonically chilly, but the muted, silky delivery sometimes hits Malkovich levels of archness.

Vikander’s blasé glamourista has the air of a bored British posh girl – most of the film’s accents are English – and she rarely convinces as more than the glimmering image The best performances are from Will Keen, spivvish and tautly agitated as Berezovksy, and from Law, whose Putin combines dead-eyed bureaucrat and embodiment of political Id, simmering with barely contained rage against his opponents and at history itself.