The film follows the notorious incident on 20 August 2020 in which Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned while on a flight from Tomsk. Luckily, the plane landed and he was taken to a hospital in Omsk. Various speculations emerged as to what happened, and the Russian doctors at first refused to transport him abroad, but eventually allowed for his treatment in Berlin, where it was confirmed he was poisoned by the Novichok chemical weapon. After months of rehabilitation, Navalny was able to recover, thanks also to the support of his wife Yulia and his team manager Leonid Volkov. Eventually, Navalny decides to retun to Moscow, where he is arrested and sent to a prison under fake charges by Vladimir Putin's Goreshist dictatorship.
"Navalny" is a bitter and dark depiction of the living relict of dictatorships in modern times and individuals trying to make a change to improve this state, here confined to just the incident that made headlines in which the Russian democratic oppostion figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned by Novichok. The director Daniel Roher wastes no time to start building the story, giving a lot of details, archive footage and interviews with people—one of the most touching moments is the interview with Navalny's daughter Daria who confesses that she had the hypothetical thought at the age of 13 that her father might be killed one day, and that she is often in fear. Roher doesn't present his protagonist as perfect—archive clips are shown when Navalny marched in a far-right rally and addressed the crowd a decade ago—but Navalny concedes he has to talk to everyone to try to reach a consensus in the country, and hints he learned his lesson and matured since then. The documentary is a powerful, gripping and tormenting account of the depressive state of affairs in Russia during Vladimir Putin's dictatorship, who makes an appearance in the film only once during a news confference where he is even unable to say Navalny's name, whereby the dictator's deteriorating mental state in need for a psychiatric treatment is revealed. When Navalny was poisoned, the Russian state media used all kinds of gaslighting, ridicule, contempt towards the victim, as well as the obligatory off-topic hate speeches aimed against liberals: Putin's propaganda is pathetically transparent, its distortion being near comical, but the state aparatus uses fear and intimidation to keep the status quo. The most astounding moment is when the team finds out the names of over a dozen agents who poisoned him, so Navalny actually phones one of them himself (!), Konstatin Kudryavtsev, presents himself as a deputy of Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, and asks why the assassination of Navalny failed, to which he gets remarkably honest answers—when Konstatin reveals secret details over the phone, Navalny's and Christo Grozev's faces are shown smiling and giggling silently in disbelief. These kind of moments of humor, hope and humanity give the movie strength in the overall dark setting.
Grade:+++
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