4 hours ago
4
Finally getting a release after the verdict in the Bulgarian spy-ring trial, James Jones’s gripping documentary takes open-source journalism website Bellingcat’s former lead investigator Christo Grozev as its main focus. But Grozev is just one of the many in Putin’s crosshairs, so the film opens out to cover several whistleblowers, dissidents and activists. Hopping between location-stamped world cities like a Hollywood thriller, the film has a Michael Mann-like dynamism and pathos in detailing the emotional cost of this defiance.
After identifying hitmen and helping a whistleblower from Russia’s chemical weapons programme to flee to Europe, Grozev finds himself on a kill-list. Warned of an imminent threat, he is unable to return home to Vienna; exiled in New York, he impotently frets about his family’s safety. His doctor points out that, where most people’s stress levels fluctuate, his are unwaveringly high – even when asleep. His situation is better, though, than his friend Alexei Navalny or fellow dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, both in Russian detention in 2023; Grozev is involved in attempts to negotiate prisoner swaps for both.
The common thread in these vignettes of resistance is the sheer vindictiveness of the Putin regime’s retribution. Even after poisoning Kara-Murza twice, they continue to tighten the screw; he is imprisoned on specious slander charges and punished at one point for lying down in his cell. All of these rebels are protagonists in their own paranoid thrillers, with Putin as the the ultimate malefactor bent on psychologically breaking them. Employing noirish two-tone animation to fill gaps in his footage, Jones never misses a dramatic beat, with the climax being Grozev’s father being found dead in mysterious circumstances in March 2023; after an inconclusive autopsy, his body is cremated by Austrian authorities.
Possibly, the film prioritises narrative over insight a touch too much. The overarching question is what motivates these rebels to continue down these paths of isolation, and how they justify putting their families in the firing line. But despite his lucid testimony Grozev, and his inner motivations, remain opaque. Elsewhere, Kara-Murza, finally freed as part of the Gershkovich prisoner exchange, has a great rejoinder for the FSB agent who tells him bid farewell to the motherland: “I’m a historian by trade, and I know that I’ll be back – and it’ll be much quicker than you think.” You desperately hope he’s right, or at least he and his family are now secure in the US. But with Putin’s little helper now in the White House, it seems safe havens may be a thing of the past.
