Olivier Assayas has never been an auteur to shy away from the labyrinthine structures of global systems. From the globalized drug trade in Demonlover to the networked paranoia of Personal Shopper, the French filmmaker has spent decades mapping the invisible architectures that shape contemporary life. In The Wizard of the Kremlin, his latest and most ambitious work, Assayas turns that instinct toward perhaps the most consequential media project of the twenty-first century: the manufacture of the modern Russian state.
Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 novel Le Mage du Kremlin, the film runs nearly three hours and casts Paul Dano as Vadim Baranov — a television producer turned political strategist loosely modeled on Vladislav Surkov, the real-life architect of what scholars have called Russia's "managed democracy." In a move that borders on the surreal, Jude Law plays a young Vladimir Putin. The narrative is framed through the perspective of an academic narrator, played by Jeffrey Wright, who visits Baranov at his isolated estate. This device allows Assayas to trace Baranov's trajectory from a cushy childhood in the Soviet civil service to his formative years in the chaotic, post-Cold War media landscape — a period when a handful of oligarchs and television executives held outsized influence over a country in institutional free fall.
From Television Studio to Kremlin Corridor
The film's central conceit is that the rise of Putinism was, at its core, a production — a narrative engineered with the same instincts that govern reality television and propaganda broadcasting. Baranov, a fan of both high art and Tupac Shakur, is plucked from the "loudly brash" world of television by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and thrust into the "quietly brash" corridors of the Kremlin. Assayas treats this transition not as a simple career change but as a shift in medium: Baranov stops producing content for screens and starts producing reality itself.
This is familiar territory for Assayas, whose filmography has long interrogated the boundary between image and power. Irma Vep, both the 1996 original and its 2022 series remake, examined how cinema consumes and reshapes identity. Carlos, his five-and-a-half-hour miniseries on the Venezuelan revolutionary, similarly treated political violence as inseparable from its mediated representation. The Wizard of the Kremlin extends that logic to state-building. The question it poses is not whether autocracies rely on myth — that much is well established — but what happens when the myth-maker is someone trained in the grammar of entertainment rather than ideology.
Da Empoli's novel drew on a rich body of reporting and scholarship about Surkov, who was widely credited with constructing a political system in which opposition movements, media narratives, and even protest culture were orchestrated from the center, creating a permanent state of managed confusion. Assayas translates this into cinematic form by oscillating between a straight biopic and a self-aware spoof, a tonal instability that mirrors the deliberate ambiguity Surkov himself cultivated.
The Binary and Its Limits
The film explores a central binary: a West obsessed with the accumulation of capital versus an East driven by the raw exercise of power. It is a provocative framework, though not an uncomplicated one. By staging this opposition through the eyes of a cultural sophisticate like Baranov — someone who moves fluently between Western art-house sensibilities and Kremlin realpolitik — Assayas avoids reducing either pole to caricature. The result is a portrait of power that feels less like political commentary and more like an anatomy of persuasion itself.
Whether the film's tonal shifts ultimately cohere or leave viewers adrift may depend on one's tolerance for Assayas's characteristic refusal to settle into a single register. The casting of Law as Putin is emblematic of this approach: it is simultaneously a bold artistic choice and a distancing device, reminding the audience at every turn that they are watching a construction, not a documentary. The wizardry of the title refers not only to Baranov's manipulation of the Russian public but to the film's own act of narrative engineering.
What lingers is a tension the film declines to resolve. If the tools of media production can build an autocracy, they can presumably also be turned against one — yet the film offers no reassurance that the same grammar of spectacle operates differently in democratic hands. The architect of influence, Assayas seems to suggest, is shaped less by the system he serves than by the medium he masters. Which system benefits is almost incidental.
With reporting from Little White Lies.
Source · Little White Lies
