Navalny

If diplomatic chatter is to be trusted, then Russian commanders are keeping the truth about how badly the invasion of Ukraine is going from Vladimir Putin. After all, Putin’s Russia is a place where “kill the messenger” is both a warning and the secret law. So one can only imagine the fireball of fury that will erupt from his Black Sea palace when the news slips that Navalny is being released.

HBO and director Daniel Roher initially airdopped Navalny into this year’s Sundance Film Festival as a last-minute addition, and it immediately became the hottest title. But then, he could have given months of warning and Navlany would have been the most thrilling, galling, terrifying, and informative documentary to have played there this year. The title is a slight misnomer, because it is a biography of two men: Alexey Navalny, the lawyer, pro-reform activist, presidential candidate, and therefore, by default, political dissident and enemy of the state; and Vladimir Putin, the former intelligence officer-turned-premier-turned-uncrowned czar.

Roher seems an unlikely documentarian to take on one of the most significant feuds in modern global politics. Maybe Navalny was a big fan of his last picture, musical history Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, and maybe that’s how he got such astonishing access at such a critical time: as Navalny and his family hid out in Germany after he was poisoned by a cadre of assassins deployed by Putin in 2020. How do we know that’s what happened? Because Navalny is also a work of investigative journalism - or rather, a witness to it, as Christo Grozev of international forensic reporters Bellingcat uses their analytical tools and cadre of experts to identify and finally track down the attempted killers. Like a real life D.O.A., it's a process that culminates in an astonishing phone call that unravels the monstrous application of state power to eradicate all dissent.

As the focus of the film, Navalny himself is a fascinating and complex figure, but Roher makes him explicable by focusing on his family, his recovery, his motivations and his growing realization that to change Russia for the better he has to risk his life. Moreover, he’s already crossed that line years earlier by daring to challenge Putin. This is where the portrait of Czar Vlad comes into sharper focus, the one that has been plastered on international screens ever since the invasion of Ukraine: his paranoia, his unwillingness to publicly acknowledge opposition, the way he won’t let anyone within assassination distance, his utter lack of fear about legal or international repercussions for crimes, his willingness to smear any opponent as a Nazi (if there’s a failing here, it’s that Roher doesn’t do quite enough to clarify how the lines between nationalism and far-right extremism in postwar Eastern Europe are not the same as they are in the U.S.).

Considering it only debuted at Sundance, Navalny already seems like a warning from history three months ago. It’s terrifying that it has already become even more relevant.