Two Prosecutors is a film about watching a candle tip over in slow motion. We know what, when, and how it will happen, and we're powerless to stop it. For two excruciating hours, we sit back and wait.

Based on the novella by Georgy Demidov, Sergei Loznitsa's first fiction film since Donbass is a meticulously crafted, often unbearably slow, and always riveting depiction of clinical evil that takes time to process. It is not an easy nor always rewarding film. Instead, it lingers in the back of your head like an itch you can't scratch.

The setting is 1937, during Stalin's Great Purge. A time when reality has lost all meaning. Words mean one thing or another from one moment to the next. Everyone is suspect of something. There are no friends, only assets, and the state monitors every move.

Somehow, a letter escapes out into the wild from one of the endless prison facilities. In it, a prisoner pleads for justice against the wild corruption of the state. The call for help finds its way into the hands of a young prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuzentsov), who, in a moment of incredible naivety, decides to do his job of prosecuting the corrupted officials at the top.

What follows is an exercise in drawn-out hostility. There's no shouting, no fighting, no gunplay. Nobody ever so much as raises their voice. Instead, things just don't happen. Someone is sick. The paperwork isn't ready. The office is closed. Your case handler just left. It is one micro-aggression after another, built into a system of bureaucracy that allows people to hurt others while pretending they're just doing their job.

The first screening of Two Prosecutors was at 10 PM on the second night of the festival. It didn't end until well after midnight. Whoever decided on the scheduling clearly took a note out of the playbook presented in the film. This is a film that demands all attention and senses, neither of which are available after 12 hours of cinema under the hot sun. Luckily, a second screening took place a week later at a far earlier hour. It gave me time to contemplate what I had already seen.

For Finns, Two Prosecutors will feel uncomfortably familiar. As a country, we suffer from lingering elements of Soviet rule that have never left our system. When someone doesn't want to do something, they bury it deep into the bureaucracy. Legislation can disappear into a labyrinth of appraisals and study for so long its initial cause will be long forgotten by the time it ever gets to a vote. If that even happens in the first place.

Most of all, it's the silent acceptance that scares me most. How easily everyone turns a blind eye because that's just how things are done. Some are scared, others are malicious, and the rest can only see what's ahead. Loznitsa's immaculate gaze captures every aspect of this society, and how easily it can be controlled by faceless men hiding in the shadows.

It's not a fun film. It's not even an easy film to recommend to anyone. But it is vital. This is a world from almost a hundred years ago, yet very little has changed. Two Prosecutors doesn't depict the past, it paints a portrait of the present in our grandparents clothes. We should be scared. But more than that, we should wake up.