The Wizard Of The Kremlin
Drama • 2025 • 2h 36m
Le Mage Du Kremlin
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
The voice of an invisible adviser and strategist, capable of moving the stage of the Kremlin from the shadows, guides the viewer into the political myth of Vladimir Putin.
“The supreme secret of power lies in multiplying invisible enemies.”
Elias Canetti:
What we are confronted with here is neither a mere political fresco nor a chronicle of power. It is rather an inquiry into the dark matter that inhabits the heart of command, where the manipulation of the image becomes more real than reality itself. The figure of the “magician” is not a symbolic ornament, but the sign of a metamorphosis: the ruler no longer governs through tangible force, but through enchantment, through the art of bending collective perception to a logic that turns fiction into destiny.
The narrative takes root precisely in this spell: the voice of an invisible adviser and strategist, capable of moving the stage of the Kremlin from the shadows, guides the viewer into the political myth of Vladimir Putin. This is not a realistic portrait, but a slow, unsettling descent into the symbolic architectures that have transformed a man into an absolute figure, into the incarnation of sovereignty and stigma. Assayas chooses neither the register of the documentary nor that of open denunciation; his narration unfolds as though summoning a ghost—the ghost of a power that fascinates and terrifies at the same time.
Putin appears here as the last contemporary leader capable of drawing the world’s gaze—not only for his political and military strength, but for the enigmatic charisma refracted through a network of images, rituals, propaganda, and staged performances. For the West, he becomes the quintessential Mephistophelean figure, constructed and fueled by power itself, symbol of a perverse seduction that transforms politics into a spectacle both demonic and paternalistic, wherever and whenever needed.
“He who is aware of his own strength is always terrible, for he no longer has need of the truth.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky:
Beside him stands the presence of the oligarchs, who embody another face of power: that of unbridled accumulation and ceaseless gambling with collective destiny. A casino magnate, in one of the most revealing sequences, utters a line that seems to crystallize the system’s core: “The casino is the monument to human irrationality, the act of betting when the odds are nil.” The magician of the Kremlin replies with icy clarity: “To bet on human irrationality is a guaranteed victory.” Out of this logic emerges the very essence of power: not to convince, not to persuade, but to generate an obsession—whatever it may be—until it becomes the only possible reality.
Assayas probes this threshold, showing that domination is not merely a bureaucratic apparatus or a system of violence, but a continuous invocation, a kind of hypnotic ritual that forges both consensus and fear at once. The director’s gaze—always oscillating between intimacy and enigma—here sharpens into a cutting chronicle, interrogating the arcane side of politics, where truth blurs with myth and falsehood becomes the very foundation of reality.
“Power has no face, only endless corridors.”
Franz Kafka:
The film carries an almost Dostoevskian tone, as though palace intrigues were entwined with a metaphysical torment: what remains of the human being when the face itself is reduced to a mere image to be manipulated? What room is left for desire, for doubt, for error, when power operates like a device designed to abolish failure? The enigma of the “magician” lies not only in the one who manipulates, but also in the one who allows himself to be bewitched: a people, a world, perhaps each of us before the screens that multiply illusions.
In this sense, Le mage du Kremlin is not merely a political film, but a tale about our deeper present: an era in which reality is not simply narrated, but incessantly manipulated, rewritten, refracted, enchanted. Assayas offers a dark mirror, and in gazing into it we recognize the condition of a present that no longer distinguishes the visible from invention, promise from threat, history from delirium. Powerful.
Cioran:
“Politics is the art of transforming the irrational into destiny.”
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
