98 min | R | April 11, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Someone in the Russian government poisons opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent and he survives. Then he helps track down the men who did it, phone call by phone call. The hunters become the hunted, and Navalny holds the receiver.
Daniel Roher’s documentary follows Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who survives a 2020 nerve-agent poisoning ordered by his own government. The film picks up during his recovery in Germany and tracks the investigation into who tried to kill him. What looks like a portrait of a dissident becomes a real-time procedural about exposing a state assassination program. The central thread is the work of Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev, who buys leaked Russian data and cross-references flight logs and phone records to name the FSB operatives who tailed Navalny for years. The movie is about a man hunting the people who poisoned him while the world watches.
Navalny plays himself with charisma that the camera cannot resist and a vanity he does not bother to hide. He cracks jokes, mugs for the lens, and manages his own image even while discussing his near-death. Grozev appears as the rumpled obsessive who treats mass-murder logistics as a data puzzle to be solved. Yulia Navalnaya stands at the edges of frame as the wife who has already buried her husband once in her mind. Maria Pevchikh, Navalny’s chief investigator, brings a cold focus that cuts against his showmanship. The contrast between his performance and her precision gives the film its tension.
Roher structures the film around a single phone call that he stages like a heist climax. Navalny dials the suspected chemical-weapons operatives one by one, posing as a Kremlin aide demanding a debrief on the failed operation. The editing holds on the silence between rings and lets the audience sweat through each rejection. Cinematographer Niki Waltl shoots Navalny in tight handheld close-ups that trap the viewer inside the paranoia of a man who knows he is being hunted. The score stays restrained and lets the documentary footage carry the dread.
The film refuses to soften Navalny into a saint. Roher presses him on past flirtations with Russian nationalists and lets the uncomfortable answers stand. The result is a thriller that happens to be true and a character study that happens to be urgent. It documents a man who returns to the country that tried to murder him because he believes the alternative is worse. The closing knows exactly what fate it is recording and does not blink.