‘The Wizard Of The Kremlin’ Review: Paul Dano & Jude Law Lead Olivier Assayas’ Fictional But Poignant Portrait Of Power In Post-Soviet Russia

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Sep 5

Paul Dano in 'The Wizard of the Kremlin'- **Courtesy of TIFF**

Ambitious, sprawling, and sometimes deliberately opaque, Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin is a biting, satirical portrait of Russia and the West — anchored by Paul Dano’s cerebral turn and Jude Law’s chilling embodiment of Putin.

Olivier Assayas has always thrived in contradiction: a director equally comfortable with intimate French dramas and globe-spanning thrillers, always blurring the line between the personal and the political. With The Wizard of the Kremlin, which premiered at TIFF following its Venice bow, he pushes that contradiction further than ever. The result is a film that is sprawling in scope, satirical in tone, and deliberately ambiguous in meaning — a portrait of modern power that is as frustrating as it is fascinating.

Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling novel, the film traces three decades of post-Soviet Russia through the eyes of Vadim Baranov, a shadowy political strategist played with cerebral detachment by Paul Dano. Baranov is Assayas’ invention, loosely inspired by Putin’s real-life media advisor Vladislav Surkov, but his role as narrator and guide gives the film its slippery perspective. We first meet him in the present day, recounting his life to an American professor (Jeffrey Wright), before the story unspools in flashbacks that move with the velocity of history itself.

Dano’s performance is the film’s anchor — cool, opaque, sometimes frustratingly unknowable — but that’s precisely the point. Baranov is a man who thrives in the shadows, crafting narratives that bend reality while never fully revealing himself. He’s both manipulator and cipher, emblematic of the new kind of power broker who rewrites history while standing just off-camera. Dano leans into this contradiction, making Baranov less sympathetic protagonist than unsettling conduit.

Then there’s Jude Law, stepping into the shoes of Vladimir Putin. On paper, the casting feels almost reckless: Law, one of Hollywood’s most magnetic stars, embodying one of the world’s most reviled political figures. But what could have been distracting becomes quietly terrifying. Law avoids mimicry, letting subtle makeup and his own gravitas suggest rather than impersonate. His Putin is a vessel of cold calculation, presented not as caricature but as inevitability — a man who understands the theater of power even as he strips it of humanity. Whenever Law is on screen, the film sharpens; whenever he disappears, it risks drifting.

Assayas and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère pack in a dizzying array of events and characters, from oligarchs and generals to wars in Chechnya and Crimea, from reality-TV productions to boardroom conspiracies. At times, the film plays like a crash-course in recent Russian history — a dramatized Wikipedia feed sprinting at 1.5x speed. This velocity is exhilarating, but it also overwhelms. Key figures blur together, narrative threads fray, and the film begins to feel less like a coherent story than an attempt to capture the chaos of a nation reinventing itself through force and fear.

And yet, even in its messiness, The Wizard of the Kremlin makes powerful statements. The satire is unmistakable: Assayas portrays politics as performance art, a carnival of mythmaking where truth is irrelevant and perception is everything. The commentary isn’t limited to Russia either. In its sly, satirical flourishes, the film implicates Western power structures and the global appetite for strongmen, suggesting that what happened in Moscow is merely a sharper version of dynamics playing out everywhere.

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The film’s length — a hefty 156 minutes — will divide audiences. It is long, often indulgent, and more comfortable raising questions than offering answers. Its ambiguity can frustrate, especially when it detours into Baranov’s personal entanglements with Alicia Vikander’s Ksenia, which feel pale beside the larger political canvas. But that slipperiness, too, feels intentional. Assayas wants to unsettle, to remind us that power is always elusive, that history is always rewritten by those who control the narrative.

For me, the experience was one of admiration mixed with exhaustion. The Wizard of the Kremlin is not an easy sit, but it’s a vital one. Its satire cuts deep, its ambition is undeniable, and its performances — particularly Dano’s cerebral manipulation and Law’s chilling restraint — make it worth the sprawl. By the end, you may feel drained, even skeptical of the film’s choices. But you’ll also feel haunted by its vision of a world where truth bends, power corrodes, and history repeats itself with terrifying ease.