Prosecution Handsomely Builds Its Case

Germany’s public prosecution system prides itself on neutrality. But in a country with Germany’s history, that raises an uncomfortable question: how neutral should a legal system be toward right-wing extremism? Faraz Shariat’s legal thriller Prosecution (2026) builds its tension inside that contradiction.

Its protagonist, Seyo Kim (Chen Emilie Yan), is a German-Korean state prosecutor who knows how selective “objectivity” can be. She has watched cases quietly dismissed. She has, at times, found herself advancing arguments that ultimately help right-wing offenders avoid serious consequences. The myth of institutional fairness isn’t theoretical to her; it’s embedded in her daily workload.

When Seyo becomes the target of a racist attack in broad daylight, the contradiction turns personal. To seek justice, she must rely on the same machinery she knows to be inconsistent. As she pushes the case toward trial, what comes into focus is not only the guilt of one attacker, but the fragility of a system that insists on neutrality even when the ideology in question openly rejects the democratic order it claims to protect.

I love that, right off the bat, Prosecution pushes an empowered victim narrative. Before she has time to process what has happened — or even receive medical attention — Seyo springs into action, directing police and evidence gatherers at the scene. She asks for coveralls to avoid contaminating her clothing and preserve it as evidence, then later arms herself and begins training at a shooting range. Crucially, this is the first moment in which the film suggests she understands the system is not designed to work seamlessly in her favour. Her decisiveness comes off less as bravado than as contingency planning: an early recognition that institutional protection may be unreliable, and that survival will require foresight long before justice can even be imagined.

Notably, Seyo is a queer woman, but the film keeps this largely on the sidelines. Rather than layering on another hot-button issue, it allows this aspect of her identity to exist matter-of-factly — as part of who she is — signalling that its critique operates structurally rather than sensationally. Prosecution does share a lineage with a trio of early-90s thrillers centred on (white) women working in law enforcement: Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990), Impulse (Sondra Locke, 1990), and Love Crimes (Lizzie Borden, 1992). The first two focus on police officers on tough beats, while in Love Crimes, Sean Young plays a district attorney attempting to trap a serial sex criminal who repeatedly finds clever ways to skirt the law. All three engage with gender-specific issues — the obstacles and prejudices women face in these professions — but they also share a pivotal thematic concern: each protagonist begins to question the very system she works within. Ultimately, the films pose the same unsettling question: how do you trust a system when you’ve not only witnessed its failure to protect real victims, but have also seen, or strongly suspect, widespread corruption and wrongdoing among those charged with safeguarding the public?

Prosecution aligns with this tradition while drastically reorienting its emphasis. Although many of its central figures — including lawyers on both sides, and a key ally in Seyo’s department — are played by women, the film’s primary concern is not gender but race, foregrounding the racialised inequities of the legal system and the ways institutions often dismiss cases that shouldn’t be that difficult to prosecute. It also calls out the legal system’s double standards: Nazis often get off lightly, while members of Antifa are often prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And as one character notes, “if a Muslim were to attack a state prosecutor, it would be treated as a national emergency.”

Prosecution briefly flirts with — but mostly resists — the logic of the classic rape-revenge narrative, even though the attack at its centre is racially motivated rather than sexual. The victim does arm herself, but does not withdraw from the state or reject the legal process; on the contrary, she places her faith in the courts and in the possibility of justice through trial. Yet that trust is conditional. The film makes clear that the system will only work for her if she is willing to bend — or break — a few rules along the way (mostly in the form of investigating similar cases from the past that may be connected to hers).

This produces an intriguing moral dilemma: justice remains imaginable, but only through acts that expose the system’s insufficiency. By allowing the victim to operate both within and against institutional boundaries, Prosecution reframes revenge not as violent retribution, but as strategic intervention — an uneasy compromise between belief in the law and recognition of its structural bias. Violence as retribution, in this story, is presented as a very last resort.

Without giving away the outcome of its tension-filled third act, my reading is that the story underscores a grim truth: the work of justice is never complete. You can go after one Nazi, but it’s like whack-a-mole — they’ll keep popping up, no matter how many trials you drag them into. This is a thoroughly engaging, well-made legal drama that puts a lot of urgent questions on the table, but it’s also a film in which viewers’ personal politics will undoubtedly affect their experience. Fascists will feel pressed and exposed, statists and shitlibs will stand and cheer, and because its main character maintains such a stubborn faith in a broken system, anarchists will probably just roll their eyes.