Follows the man who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning with a lethal nerve agent in August 2020. During his months-long recovery, he makes shocking discoveries about the attempt on his life and decides to return home.
Published April 24, 2022Updated April 27, 2022.Even with those latest grim developments, this documentary, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band”), plays like a crowd-pleaser, a profile of a politician with the unflagging courage to swim against a rising totalitarian tide. It helps that Navalny has a movie star’s charisma and wit. In the first moments, Navalny implores Roher to make the film a thriller.
The film shows Navalny working with the investigative journalists Christo Grozev and Maria Pevchikh to track down his suspected poisoners. That staple of detective movies, an evidence board with faces linked by pieces of string, is on the wall with Putin’s face at the top. In one riveting scene at a rented Airbnb in Germany’s Black Forest, Navalny, pretending to be an aide to a top Federal Security Service (FSB) official, calls the suspects one by one on speakerphone – early in the morning to catch them off guard.
