The smoking gun moment in the sensationally gripping new documentary "Navalny" is something to see. We are deep in the investigative weeds with Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, and Christo Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist investigating the August 2020 poisoning that nearly ended Navalny's life. By this point in the film, they've already amassed considerable evidence that the assassination attempt was ordered by the Kremlin, but that still doesn't prepare you for the electrifying sequence in which Navalny starts calling up the men who executed the plot and confronting them, one by one, with what he knows.
The first few men immediately hang up. But then Navalny — showing some of the smarts and daring that helped make him the public face of anti-Putin resistance — tries a different tack with one of them, pretending to be a Kremlin functionary demanding answers as to why the poisoning failed. To the shock of Navalny and his colleagues, the man on the other end steps right into the trap and begins dropping secret after incriminating secret, including the means by which the deadly nerve agent Novichok made its way into Navalny's system.
It's a jaw-dropping moment — even the generally unflappable Grozev covers his face in exhilaration and disbelief — in a documentary that moves with the swiftness and tension of a crackerjack thriller. But what gives the scene its authority, its too-good-to-be-scripted dramatic force, is its undertow of bureaucratic banality and ineptitude. Whatever glamorous fantasies we may still attach to the world of international espionage, here is the drab reality of the thing: a bungled plot carried out by some dumb schlub smearing toxic ooze inside a guy's boxer shorts.
