Antidote
(UK, 90min.)
Dir. James Jones
Programme: Special Presentations
On first blush, James Jones’ Antidote feels like a spy thriller. Its lead subject seems coincidentally similar the protagonist in the recently released Rami Malek film The Amateur. Antidote’s central subject, journalist Christo Grozev, is one of the founders of the investigative unit Bellingcat, and gained further international attention and notoriety with his featured role in Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning Navalny investigating the assassination attempt on Russian politician Alexei Navalny.
As shown in Roher’s film, Grozev is the kind of mildly obsessive individual who mines data to uncover hidden patterns, exactly the kind of nerdy expert whose ability to find patterns in the chaos is central to works of superhero lore. Yet in Grozev’s case, his remarkable ability to coax secrets that expose the uniquely brutal nature of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime quite literally has placed a target on his head, making the hunter the hunted as he tries to come to terms with a seemingly rapacious enemy.
While Roher’s film went beyond the cult of personality of its subject, diving deeply into both the psychology and ideology of its protagonist, Jones (On the President’s Orders) offers a film that feels superficial and naïve. That’s not to say the filmmaker is not to be commended for pulling off the portrait in the first place, given the intricacies of security required to even make the film. Much has been made about the challenges of keeping things quite, from secure communications (such as Signal messages sent to outside journalists!), to ensuring the editing of the film was done on systems disconnected from the internet. But despite all these barriers to telling the story, the result is a bit too straightforward to live up to the sense of drama to which the overwrought visuals and blockbuster-mimicking motion graphics allude.
Speaking of graphics, another major subject of the film is an unnamed scientist who apparently was responsible for readapting the deadly Novichok poison for use in covert assassinations. In order to keep his identity secret, the faces of the man and his wife and children have been superimposed with digital masks, blurry and frankly distracting AI-looking CGI avatars that provide moments of human expression like smiling or gritting teeth, but look like a poorly render video game. It’s another barrier the filmmaker was forced to confront, and the benefits of the scientist’s inclusion are obvious from a narrative perspective, but despite the warning ahead of the film, the results feel more distracting than engaging.
A third subject is Vladimir Kara-Murza, an activist, journalist, and poisoning victim who, like Navalny, went back to his homeland of Russia only to be arrested and put on trial. Much of the film centres on Grozev’s desire to free Navalny and others in a prisoner swap, orchestrated in part to free a murderer that Bellingcat helped capture in the first place. For those aware of the fate of Navalny, the sense of hope feels that much more depressing when seen in retrospect, and the most cynical of responses of others more aware of Putin’s motives appear practically prescient.
The challenge with Jones’ film is its lack of narrative clarity, bouncing back and forth between these various stories in half measures at best. The central drama of Grozev’s falling-apart family has moments that are deeply engaging, but save for a fairly saccharine on-camera interview with his son, we only hear snippets of the familial turmoil over speaker phone. Similarly, the deeper ideological drives of Kara-Murza are left unexplored, and his wife’s brave face about his duty to return to Russia borders upon propagandistic knowing the fate he likely faces.
There’s a clear balance here between individuals with the courage to stand up to tyranny, but equally a slippery slope where their own drives towards martyrdom overwhelms any semblance of self-preservation. The cost of the trade, where a provably murderous individual is returned to Russia in exchange for these individuals, would have been less possible if Navalny and Kara-Murza had made their same arguments from Europe, preventing themselves from being used and exploited as pawns to be sacrificed.
These larger questions would warrant a deeper dive into the subject matter that Roher’s film explored, and in Jones’ telling, we’re instead given something far more scattershot and thus far less impressive. Journalistically, there are some fine ingredients in Antidote, and these individuals are certainly worthy of focus, but the burdensome style and almost kitschy spy thriller aesthetic borders on the ridiculous given the seriousness of these events. Antidote works best as an augmentation to the events captured in Navalny.
Slightly more surreal is how contemporary events have reshaped how we see a film such as this, for the very notion of Grozev finding refuge in the United State free from the reach of Putin’s thugs feels almost laughable given what’s occurred politically over the last few months (and even hours, as this review is written). [The film first premiered in June 2024, before Trump was even re-elected.] While Grozev’s journey continues, so does global turmoil over Putin’s campaigns of terror, be they large scope military operations or individualized operations to commit political murder. While we see through the lives of these three individuals the extent of what these powers are capable of, the larger questions are merely hinted at, and specific topics are barely explored.
So while Antidote has several of the ingredients to make for a truly remarkable film, it simply never coalesces into anything approaching the significance of its subject matter. The film also has the challenge of a primary subject whose internal levels of stress are off the charts but continues to comport himself with an almost distracting level of reticence. As a result, his story lacks the immediacy of impact that one could hope from such an investigation of an unfinished story yet to be fully written.
