Over the 130 minutes of The Wizard Of The Kremlin, which filmmaker Olivier Assayas splits into miniseries-like chapters of fictionalized pop history, an oligarchical Russia rises in place of a crumbling Soviet Union. The factors that allow it to do so are based in greed and fear, but also owe plenty to the masterminds in the shadows knowingly exploiting both. Much like Ali Abbasi’s cartoonish takedown The Apprentice, The Wizard Of The Kremlin focuses on the Roy Cohn to Vladimir Putin’s Donald Trump: Vladislav Surkov, fictionalized as Vadim Baranov in both Giuliano da Empoli’s novel and Assayas’ adaptation. While The Wizard Of The Kremlin isn’t entirely effective as a Russian history lesson, expansive drama, or Death Of Stalin-style satire, it does offer a crash course on the kind of hypernormalization that propelled both Putin and Trump to power—and helped warp reality around their black holes of disinformation.
When Baranov (Paul Dano) is recruited into the fold of Russian political players, the former TV producer is told that it’s time to “stop making up stories, and start inventing reality.” That this reality is constructed around the whims of Vladimir Putin (Jude Law), plucked from the KGB as a malleable strongman, only helps make the film’s echoes of its American foil all the more resonant. Throughout The Wizard Of The Kremlin, the film reminds its audience that Putin always had inventive minions behind him—especially Baranov, the grand vizier whose real-life counterpart helped construct the idea of “sovereign democracy.” This meaningless oxymoron is just one example of how this advisor’s background in theater, PR, and TV helped influence an approach to political control recognizable to anyone living through the Trump era.
As Soviet-focused professor Alexei Yurchak would explain in the early 2000s, the residents of the U.S.S.R. (and then Russia) succumbed to delusion on a grand scale, a symptom of social and political upheaval and failure so overwhelming—and of propaganda so successful—that no alternative seemed possible. All anyone could do was keep pretending like everything was working just fine. The resulting acceptance of, or perhaps resignation to, a post-truth world was later tied to Western culture by filmmaker Adam Curtis in his film HyperNormalisation in 2016.
That documentary highlighted Trump’s rise as the quintessential image of business success despite his frequent bankruptcies, nonpayments, and legal losses, all of which would mirror the flood of lies he’d use to overwhelm contemporary journalism when running for office. It also noted that this approach mirrored that of Putin and Surkov a few years earlier, whose “political technologists” were key to expanding mere manipulation into something broader: A coordinated attack aimed at muddling the very worldviews of a population. It’s this that forms the most affecting moments of Assayas’ film, where Baranov uses state money to finance a swath of conflicting groups, ranging from hardline leftists to skinhead bikers to online conspiracy theorists to entire opposition parties, making sure subversives at every extreme were working for Putin at the end of the day.
That these different groups were all funded by the Kremlin made it hard to trust anyone. Who was a paid actor and who wasn’t? Was there any real opposition to Putin? It’s hard to mount a collective resistance movement when mistrust is so deeply ingrained. This confusion was intentional, and, if one was being generous, can even be found in the exotic menagerie of accents on display in the film, all evoking a fantasy Russia which, through its explicit theatricality, attempts to evoke the indecipherable chaos of the real Russia. It’s felt in Dano’s sold-out softness and in Law’s sociopathic emptiness, felt in the toy-box caricatures of hedonistic oligarchs and actresses that surround them. It doesn’t make for a very serious look at decades of history, but The Wizard Of The Kremlin isn’t attempting to nail down a Russian reality any more than it is trying to directly tie its observations to modern America. It’s in its observation of hyperreality in action, its bleak look at constructed chaos, that the film inevitably feels close to home.
Director: Olivier Assayas
Writer: Olivier Assayas, Emmanuel Carrère
Starring: Paul Dano, Jude Law, Alicia Vikander, Will Keen, Tom Sturridge, Jeffrey Wright
Release Date: May 15, 2026
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