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Kompromat Takes Aim at Russia’s FSB

Joanna Kulig and Gilles Lellouche in KOMPROMAT, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Visually as dark as its theme, Kompromat—a new thriller co-written and directed by Jérôme Salle—feels all too timely following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though it was conceived and shot well before the initial invasion last year, Kompromat takes on additional weight in the wake of Putin’s war, one that is partly about power, partly about resources, and in no small part at all about culture. Employing the generic tropes of the espionage thriller, Kompromat illustrates the stakes in Russia’s war against cultural progressivism—especially when the dreaded Federal Security Service (FSB) comes knocking.

Mathieu (Gilles Lellouche) is a French diplomat who accepts a post a long ways away, in Irkutsk (just north of Russia’s Mongolian border), where he will head Siberia’s Alliance Française, a cultural exchange post. Perhaps it is overly optimistic of him to believe the assignment will not only invigorate his struggling marriage, but also improve relations between his native France and Siberian Russia. Mathieu’s staging of progressivist cultural events and support for liberal artistic expression isn’t the kind of cultural exchange the Russian authorities welcome, however. In Putin’s Russia, expressions of liberalism are met with utter disdain—and in this case, with vengeful, draconian action.

A Russian method for dealing with those who run afoul of their leaders’ standards, kompromat is a portmanteau of the Russian words for compromising (компрометирующий) and material (материал). Its origins dating back to the 1930s, it became a Russian KGB slang term for disparaging information that can be used to weaken, or “compromise,” an enemy of the state. Many Americans became familiar with the term when Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy was theorized to have been supported by Putin personally, based on the Kremlin’s allegedly compromising material—its use of kompromat—implicating Trump.

In Salle’s film, the stakes are a little lower, admittedly, than those involving the leader of the free world, but Kompromat nonetheless illustrates just how the strategy can work to bring down an alleged “enemy of the state.” Mathieu is no social-justice rabble-rouser: his worst offense is a staged event featuring men kissing each other. His cultural programming in Irkutsk may strike Western viewers as benign, but it’s nonetheless a threat to the Russian state, and the FSB there proceeds with an attack. Mathieu is arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. It’s a sham charge, but Matthieu can’t count on the support of his now-estranged and loveless wife; nor can he depend on a reliable defense from his court-appointed public defender, whose legal acumen is matched only by his mastery of French, which is to say neither approaches anything remotely resembling competence.

Mathieu is arrested and handcuffed.
Gilles Lellouche in KOMPROMAT, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and isolated, Mathieu finds himself in an impossible situation. He can’t mount a defense. His family refuses to help. Even the French authorities, embarrassed by his arrest, are of no assistance. There is little he can do other than to try to escape with the help of Svetlana (Joana Kulig, Cold War), daughter-in-law of an FSB officer, with whom Mathieu begins to make a vital, and, ultimately, a romantic, connection. Together, they mount his escape to freedom, with the FSB, led by fearsome Ivan-Drago type Sagarine (Igor Jijikine), hot on their proverbial heels.

Svetlana pulls her coat collar and stares at the camera.
Joanna Kulig as Svetlana in KOMPROMAT, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Kompromat borrows liberally from the pantheon of thrillers about the wrongfully accused. Shot in Lithuania, its dark interrogation rooms and darker streets make for a bleak picture of a contemporary Russia. For a thriller, its action sequences are relatively tame. I’m not one to advocate for more gun violence onscreen, but do FSB agents like Sagarine and his team never pack heat when pursuing their quarry? Ultimately, Mathieu’s freedom comes down to a face-off against Sagarine: even at age 57, Jijikine is still a physical presence, long after giving Indiana Jones hell in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Mathieu, wearing a stocking cap, parka, and backpack, makes his way through a swamp.
Gilles Lellouche in KOMPROMAT, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

These thriller maneuvers that give Kompromat its structure are executed with more competence than panache. That Mathieu himself is a generally uninteresting man who, frankly, seems less than savvy in staging queer content for his Russian audience makes his wrongful imprisonment hard to care too deeply about. He’s not a man driven to care for a child or to fight for a cause; he simply seeks his own freedom. Onscreen for nearly every minute of the film, Lellouche plays him straight. There are no deep crises of conscience, no scenes of mortal panic about a loved one’s safety, no moments of ingenious resourcefulness—in short, little of what makes similarly-structured films like North by Northwest, Three Days of the Condor, The Fugitive, Flightplan, or Invisible Man so thrilling—just a steadfast, resolute determination to escape.

In much smaller roles, Kulig and Jijikine are far more impactful, making the most of their rather slightly-drawn characters’ service to Kompromat’s simple plot. (For a two-hour-plus film, there are no subplots: every character exists only to deny or support Mathieu’s quest for freedom.) Where Kompromat comes to register most, however, is in its uncannily prescient literalization of the culture war Putin’s Russia is fighting in Ukraine. If that war is based in no small part on an attempt to control the liberal-leaning and Western-influenced impulses of the Ukrainians, Kompromat shows one way that battle is being fought against anyone who dares to cross the Kremlin’s line in the sand.


Magnet Releasing will release KOMPROMAT, starring Gilles Lellouche and Joanna Kulig and directed by Jérôme Salle, in theaters and on demand January 27, 2023. In French and Russian, with English subtitles.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Publisher of Film Obsessive. A professor emeritus of film studies and an avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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