Plenty of disturbing images Putin in hospital - AI film shows Kremlin leader as a nursing case

Russian President Putin is now coming to cinemas as an AI-generated character. The film is intended to show what can happen if the Kremlin leader is not stopped.

DPA

06.01.2025, 22:44

06.01.2025, 22:58

dpa

Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin likes to show his tough side, as someone who cracks down. So it stands to reason that his opponents want to see him as a weakling, a cowardly monster driven by fear. And this is how the leader of Russia, who has ruled with a heavy hand for more than 25 years, now looks in the AI film "Putin. War is Coming", which will be released in cinemas on January 9.

The Kremlin leader generated with artificial intelligence - similar to the real Putin, but not to be confused with him. The team led by Polish director Patryk Vega has produced a kind of horror film about Putin's life, which has been characterized by brutality since his early childhood.

The result is an opulently illustrated biography that, very predictably, leaves no good hair on Putin's head. Vega, whose work critics have repeatedly slammed as vulgar cinema, delights in a president who sometimes trembles half-naked in diapers in a hospital bed, then lies soiled on the floor and is washed by staff.

The filmmakers are also likely to have been inspired by the repeated speculation about Putin's state of health. The Kremlin has repeatedly emphasized that Putin is in excellent health. In real life, the Kremlin leader has appeared in the past as a swimmer or in judo or ice hockey. But in the film, an ageing Putin plays the leading role, who is close to the end.

Many invented images

The film, which is based on many true events, relocates the present-day story of an ailing Putin and his general, played by Thomas Kretschmer ("Stalingrad"), to the year 2026. The character looks like the real 72-year-old Putin, whose life stages are then rewound as they are largely known from critical biographies. Nevertheless, there are plenty of invented images.

One example is the scene at the presidential desk, where Putin is talking to the gymnast Alina Kabaeva, who is ridiculed as the most flexible woman in Russia, while his horrified wife Lyudmila enters the office. He wants to erase her from the history books as First Lady, says the Putin figure. The affair with Kabaeva was never confirmed - and Putin announced his separation together with his wife in front of the cameras during a visit to the theater in 2013.

Brutal scenes of a life

The viewer is immersed in a long life, including Putin's time as a KGB officer with a traumatic stopover in Dresden and his return to his home city of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), where he made a career in the city administration in the chaotic and crime-ridden 1990s. Mayor Anatoly Sobchak was his political mentor at the time. The film also takes up the legend that Sobchak was murdered when Putin was already in Moscow so that his insider knowledge would not become a threat before the 2000 presidential election.

The murder scene burns itself into the viewer's memory - officially Sobchak died of a heart attack. And alongside the deliberate elimination of President Boris Yeltsin, who is portrayed primarily as a drunkard, it is one of many key moments intended to illustrate Putin's unscrupulous thirst for power. We see a Putin haunted by the ghosts of the past, who uses wars such as in Chechnya and today in Ukraine primarily as a means of retaining power.

The focus is not on the apparatus, but always on Putin, the former head of the secret service, who also has explosions organized in residential buildings in order to subjugate the people of the country with fear. Director Vega concentrates on the terror that spreads under Putin in the early years. Visualized here are hostage-takings in Moscow's Dubrovka Theatre (2002) and at the school in Beslan (2004).

Cities reduced to rubble by bombing raids can also be seen - including in Ukraine. Last but not least, the massacre in the town of Butsha, not far from the capital Kiev, is remembered as a symbol of Russian war crimes. To this day, Putin denies any responsibility for this.

There are no new findings about Putin

The result is a picture show of the worst crimes, which viewers can also see as a form of artistically condensed protest against Putin. In Russia, with its strict approval practice for film licenses, it has been ensured that the film will not be shown in cinemas. Nevertheless, even state media drew attention to the fact that the film exists.

"Another building block in hybrid information warfare," said prominent parliamentary deputy Leonid Sluzki about the film. Artificial intelligence and deepfake technology are used to distort the image of Russia and its president. He would not watch the film and could not recommend it to others. Andrei Lugovoi, a member of the Duma, said that the film was at the bottom of the drawer. The former secret service officer is suspected of being involved in the murder of Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko. The former secret service officer died in London in 2006 from the radiation poison polonium 210.

All in all, "Putin" is not a completely absurd film, but is at times chillingly close to reality. Above all, Vega also explores the question of what happens if someone like Putin is not stopped. From this perspective, nothing good can be expected. And so, in the end, everything leads to the big question in the geopolitical confrontation of our time, whether Putin, as the head of the largest nuclear power next to the USA, will ultimately resort to the last resort - according to the motto: after me, the deluge.