Apart from Donald Trump, there is hardly a person in contemporary political life who is the subject of as much speculation and conjecture as Vladimir Putin, who has been steering Russia's fortunes for almost a quarter of a century. Kremlinology Even during the Cold War, the attempt was made to find out the “how?” and “why?” of the rulers in the Moscow center of power. In plain German you could perhaps simply call it reading the coffee grounds.
The Polish director Patryk Vega is now doing something similar in his biographical film “Putin”which loosely strings together events in the life of the Russian autocrat – although without deriving any relevant insight from them. This is hardly surprising, as Vega has made a name for himself in recent years primarily with his brutally striking, immensely popular “Pitbull” trilogy. The most exciting but also most problematic aspect of the loud, superficial film is the use of modern AI technology to recreate Putin's face as a deceptively (?!) real deepfake.
Welcome to the Uncanny Valley: Do the almost perfect deepfake animations look particularly real or particularly fake?
In 2026, Russian President Vladimir Putin is wasting away in a hospital. His empire and power are slipping through his fingers as the diaper-wearing despot literally wallows in his own shit. His life began many years ago in war-ravaged Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg. Here the young Putin learned the laws of the street, which he later knew how to use in the hallowed halls of power. Like a mafia godfather, Putin first acted as mayor of Petersburg and later as deputy to Boris Yeltsin, from whom he took over control of the former superpower Russia in 2000. Putin's ambitions are getting bigger and bigger, his actions are becoming more and more unscrupulous, while thousands of deaths from Chechnya to Ukraine line his path to ultimate power…
It certainly wasn't expected that populist director Patryk Vega would make a subtle, nuanced film about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although his films such as “Pitbull” and “Small World” are incredibly successful in cinemas in Poland, his penchant for violence and vulgarity has earned him a reputation as a berserker who tackles relevant topics such as forced prostitution or human trafficking but dealt with in such a striking way that his films often seem more voyeuristic than enlightening. Now Vladimir Putin is certainly not someone who deserves to be handled with kid gloves. But almost everything that is suspected and rumored about Putin is speculation and conjecture.
Poking around in the dark
The true background to the hostage-taking in Moscow's Dubrovka Theater in 2002 or in Beslan, Chechnya in 2004 remains unclear to this day. Were they actually false flag operations initiated by Putin that only served as a pretext for violence against the breakaway republic of Chechnya, as Vega suggests? You don't know for sure. Nor whether and to what extent Putin, as mayor of Saint Petersburg, threw himself into the local mafia and earned millions through crooked deals. Putin doesn't give interviews to independent journalists; no one would probably dare to report independently and truthfully about his years as a KGB agent in Dresden or his childhood in Petersburg anyway.
Which almost inevitably forces a biographical film like “Putin” to speculate. As a Polish citizen, you certainly can't blame Vega for always choosing the most extreme variant in his script, making Putin appear as repulsive, corrupt and manipulative as possible at every moment. However, at a certain point it just makes his film seem pretty tiring and monotonous.
The young years of the later autocrat and warmonger are also brought up in flashbacks.
And then there is the ethical problem of image manipulation – which will certainly become even more striking in the future. Modern deepfake or AI techniques already make it possible to manipulate images and voices in a way that can hardly be recognized as fakes. If even a film like “Putin,” which can only dream of an average Hollywood budget, is able to imitate a real person so deceptively realistically and show them in any situation, then what will happen in ten or 20 years be possible?
Given the countless crimes for which Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly responsible, one might find it amusing and deserved to see him whining, drooling, shitting himself in such fake images. However, one should not overlook the fact that such manipulated images may already be created today by politicians or other public figures who have committed nothing comparable. The purposes for which this rapidly developing technology is being used will likely be discussed extensively in the coming years, especially when it comes to people who are not as obviously condemnable as Vladimir Putin.
Conclusion: In his ostensibly biographical film “Putin,” Polish director Patryk Vega strings together events from the life of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that move loosely between truth and speculation. The outstanding stylistic device is the problematic deepfake technology, whose potential dangers for the future of (political) discourse the film also suggests – probably rather unintentionally.