Last week, the jury president of the Berlin Film Festival claimed that this year’s edition would provide an “opposite” to politics. If such a thing exists, it certainly doesn’t look anything like Faraz Shariat’s sophomore feature Prosecution—a narratively propulsive yet finely detailed procedural (all props to screenwriter Claudia Schaefer) that overflows with political statements, ideas, and fears. It’s a courtroom drama that follows a German state prosecutor of Korean extraction as she attempts to uncover a network of Neo-Nazis in the Eastern provinces. Prosecution is robustly directed and consistently thrilling, even when it lifts up the country’s monolithic justice system to see what’s crawling around underneath.
Prosecution comes at a fruitful time for the courtroom genre. As streamers and studios fall over each other trying to reinvent whatever might be genre du jour, the least-flashy and -economically taxing of Hollywood’s old warhorses continues to inspire convention-bending work from a wide range of international auteurs and in various corners of the form. In the last five years, along with Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 and William Friedkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, we’ve had the hybrid wonders of Alice Diop’s Saint Omar, the dizzying chills of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, and the Palme d’Or-certified success of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall.
If I had to choose one work to compare with Shariat’s, it would easily be Plante’s Rooms—a 2023 sleeper hit that showed a similarly steady eye when it came to the darkest corners of the Internet. Prosecution never reaches that film’s stomach-churning heights, but with its Lizbeth Sandler-coded protagonist and muscular style, it feels as if it has arrived in the same slipstream. Prosecution’s lead is not a voluntary participant or observer in the narrative, however, but the instigator of its relentless forward momentum.
Chen Emilie Yan gives an astonishing performance as Seyo Kim, a prosecutor whose pursuit of far-right cells leads to her becoming the victim of a vicious, racist assault. The attack itself—which involves a cyclist, an underpass, and a Molotov cocktail—is among a number of clinically executed set pieces; but it’s the manner in which Seyo reacts to it—calling the forensics team within seconds and refusing treatment, all the better to sift through the evidence—that sets the tone for Shariat’s film and positions her as a formidable antihero. She’s supported emotionally by her friend and colleague Ayten (Alev Irmak) and later teams up with a lawyer, Alexandra (Julia Jentsch), when the time comes to take her case to court. Playing her superior, Arnd Klawitter rounds out an excellent cast that’s only strengthened by the distinctive, menacing-looking figures who populate the film’s margins.
That refusal to be cowed by her attackers is the driving force that takes her from one seemingly inadvisable situation to the next: staking out a bakery where her assailant might work, reopening cases that have long gone cold, sneaking into document rooms in the dead of night. Yet Shariat’s film seldom asks you to worry about her, even when something with the stench of conspiracy threatens to overwhelm. If Prosecution has a defining image, it’s Seyo prowling through villages and backroads in her matte black Dodge Challenger, a tank of a vehicle that’s just a few adornments away from looking like the Batmobile (though I probably could have done without its use in the film’s coda).
This is the director’s second feature after making a splash in this same festival with No Hard Feelings six years prior—a queer story about a trio of immigrants that evinced a director able to tackle hot-button issues with admirable flare. For budget, scope, and sheer volume (the score, by Icelandic composer Gabríel Ólafs, recalls the cello-based doom-core of Hildur Guðnadóttir), Prosecution constitutes a major leap forward.
Prosecution premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.