Originally published April 9, 2022.
Amidst the shocking flood of horror stories emerging from Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine in recent weeks, one related news item may have been overshadowed. On 22 March, high-profile Russian opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who is already serving jail time outside Moscow on embezzlement charges that are widely seen as a politically motivated sham, was sentenced to a further nine years behind bars.
With Vladimir Putin’s thuggish regime cracking down on free speech, independent media and anti-war protest in Russia, young Canadian director Daniel Roher’s gripping non-fiction crime thriller Navalny feels especially timely. Shot in secret and kept under wraps ahead of its world premiere at Sundance in January, Roher’s depiction of courageous resistance to an increasingly homicidal dictator screens at the Movies That Matter Festival in the Netherlands this week, with a slot at Canada’s Hot Docs to follow in late April. It also opens on British cinema screens this week, with co-producers CNN and HBO Max planning a Spring streaming release in North America.
The film opens with Navalny’s dramatic near-death experience in August 2020, when he was poisoned with the lethal nerve agent Novichok, apparently placed in his underwear by officers from the Russian Federation’s FSB security service, the successor to the KGB. He survives the attack, but only just, his formidable wife Yulia battling sinister hospital bosses and obstructive guards in order to fly her comatose husband out of Russia for safer treatment in Germany. As Navalny recovers in snowy Black Forest exile in late 2020, Roher arrives to record the rare spectacle of a man investigating his own attempted murder. In January 2021, the director follows Navalny’s bold return to Moscow, where protesters hail him as a returning hero, and police immediately arrest him.
Roher did not initially plan to make a documentary about Navalny. His original focus was Bellingcat, the investigative journalism group who use metadata and open-source intelligence to forensically fact-check war crimes, human rights abuses and government corruption. But his discussions with Christo Gozrev, a soft-spoken Bulgarian working for the group, were soon overtaken by the fast-moving poison drama. After persuading a wary Navalny that he is not some deep-cover CIA plant but just “a nerd with a laptop”, Gozrev enacts a kind of high-tech sorcery, using black-market phone data and flight manifests to narrow down the identities of the FSB agents who most likely tried to murder the dissident politician. Amazingly, he swiftly uncovers what appears to be a “domestic assassination machine on an industrial scale.”
Even if you know the well-publicised sting that came next, it is still a jaw-dropping piece of political drama to witness on screen. After Bellingcat identify a list of FSB agents who were likely involved in the bungled poisoning, Navalny prank-calls his own would-be killers, posing as a Kremlin insider trying to assess what went wrong. Some do not even reply, others hang up suspiciously. But a hapless chemist named Konstantin Kudryavtsev is duped into disclosing the whole plot in minute detail, which Roher captures on camera. Afterwards Navalny’s team can barely conceal their incredulous joy, until it dawns on them that their expose could end up signing Kudryavtsev’s own death warrant.
When Navalny blows up the story into a global news sensation, state-controlled Russian media stooges go into farcical damage limitation mode, firing off angry denials and crackpot alternative explanations. At a TV press conference, a clearly rattled Putin tries to shrug off the poison plot with chilling claims that a real FSB assassination would not have failed. In keeping with unofficial Kremlin policy, the Russian president never even mentions Navalny by name, which lends a edge of sinister comedy to his smirking, bare-faced lies.
Roher’s documentary is specifically about the events around the poison attack, not a full biographical profile of Navalny. This tight, limited focus is both a strength and weakness, trading deeper context for detailed examination of a single true-crime case. But to his credit, the director does challenge Navalny to explain his association with some of Russia’s far-right, anti-immigrant parties in the early 2000s. Initially tetchy and evasive, he eventually concedes that he was forging uneasy alliances in order to build a broader opposition movement to Putin. “It’s my political superpower,” Navalny says, “I can talk to anyone.” For the sake of fairness and clarity, his public statements ever since have been overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. He has also been consistently critical of Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine.
A savvy media operator and handsome screen presence, Navalny turns on the charm for Roher’s camera. He comes across as charismatic, funny, determined, a little arrogant but ultimately impressively brave. Interviews with his wife and teenage children lend extra personal bite to this high-stakes struggle. The stirring musical score, by Marius de Vries and Matt Robertson, is a little too emotionally didactic in places, striking an incongruously triumphant note in the bleak final section. But minor style issues aside, Navalny is a timely and compelling portrait of inspirational heroism in the face of murderous evil, gaining extra urgency with Russia’s mounting war crimes in Ukraine. Alas, it inevitably leaves a bitter aftertaste while Navalny remains a political prisoner and Putin is still at large, a brutal tyrant bent on poisoning the entire world.
Director: Daniel Roher
Cast: Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, Mariya Pevchikh, Christo Grozev, Leonid Volkov
Producers: Odessa Rae, Diane Becker, Melanie Miller, Shane Boris
Cinematographer: Niki Waltl
Editing: Langdon Page, Maya Daisy Hawke
Music: Marius de Vries, Matt Robertson
Production companies: CNN Films, HBO, Fishbowl Films, RaeFilm Studios, Cottage M
In English, Russian
98 minutes
