Icarus: The Aftermath

The Aftermath may lack the novelty of the first film and often takes on more than its runtime can account for, but it also successfully adapts the genre of espionage thriller to the documentary form with riveting results.

Icarus: The Aftermath is both more intimate and of broader scope than the earlier film. It’s documentary as spy thriller, a portrait of institutional gaslighting, a legal nail-biter, an intimate look at the cost of refuting authoritarian doctrine, and, above all, an affecting character study.

Incredible and enraging in equal doses, the project plays like a tense spy thriller as Rodchenkov is assigned a security team and shuffled from one safe house to another, while enemies of the state — Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny — are poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok.

Aftermath is the work of a stronger and more assured director. It drops mind-boggling revelations about the extent of Russian doping and the lengths to which Vladimir Putin’s administration will go to silence dissidents and whistleblowers, but it’s also a deeply touching portrait of a man whose life was shattered because he got tired of being part of a system that ran on lies.

Icarus: The Aftermath is a poignant and powerful document about the unpredictable burdens of heroism.