The new film about how Putin’s Russia was born

Featuring a much-anticipated performance by Jude Law as Vladimir Putin, this new drama looks to explore how the Russian president came to power – and presents him as mild-mannered.

Olivier Assayas’s new drama The Wizard of the Kremlin, which has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, features Jude Law as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. But the film may disappoint anyone expecting they might see Law rage and threaten his underlings as he did when he played another real-life ruler, Henry VIII, in 2023’s Firebrand. His Putin (who speaks English dialogue with an English accent) is a calm, mild-mannered figure, and he isn’t even the film’s main character. But The Wizard of the Kremlin does offer an intriguingly plausible interpretation of how Putin’s Russia came to be after the dissolution of the USSR.

Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling 2022 novel of the same name, the film focuses on the soft-spoken Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a fictional character inspired by a real Russian politician, Vladislav Surkov, who was Putin’s personal advisor for several years. To make another Henry VIII reference, The Wizard of the Kremlin is comparable to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels, in that it’s about the quietly wily strategist behind the throne rather than the monarch sitting on it.

Baranov explains to a visiting US academic (Jeffrey Wright) that he was a student in the early 1990s when communism had collapsed and Moscow was abuzz with young people enjoying the new freedoms they believed they would never lose. He wanted to be an actor and theatre director, but soon decided that he could be more influential as a television executive, feeding the populace trashy game shows.

It’s while he is doing this job that he is recruited by Boris Berezovsky (a real business oligarch, played here by a British actor, Will Keen) to help him with the re-election campaign of the ageing president, Boris Yeltsin: one trick is to strap Yeltsin to his chair so that he sits upright rather than slumping forward onto his desk, and then to dub excerpts from his old speeches over his current slurring words. Both Berezovsky and Baranov appreciate that, in politics, appearances can mean more than reality.

Yeltsin is re-elected, but Berezovsky knows that the president’s time is almost up – and so is his money-oriented regime. Capitalism has turned Russia into a supermarket, Berezovsky argues, whereas its citizens crave the fiefdom they once knew. And they don’t want to be led by another politician spouting statistics, they want someone who seems tough and direct. The person Berezovsky has in mind for prime minister, and then president, is a straight-talking civil servant named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. “He’s no rocket scientist, but he’ll do just fine for now,” says the oligarch.