'Litvinenko' Is a Crime Drama About the Aftermath of Assassination

Many people are probably passingly familiar with the story of British-naturalised Russian defector Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, who was allegedly killed by radiation poisoning by the Russian government. Fewer are probably aware of the horrifically gruesome and painful way he died, the extended fallout from his alleged assassination, or the British investigation into whether or not Vladimir Putin was involved in his death.

Sundance Now drama Litvinenko aims to change all that, turning the infamous international poisoning scandal into something akin to a traditional crime procedural, focusing heavily on the Scotland Yard officers who worked tirelessly to prove that not only was Litvinenko murdered, he was killed by agents of the Russian government.

The real Litvinenko was a former FSB agent who fled Russia with his family to the U.K. in 2000 after publicly accusing his superiors of orchestrating the murder of a powerful oligarch. In November of 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned and hospitalized, passing away later that month as the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. (Polonium-210 is highly radioactive and, therefore, extremely toxic. One microgram is more than enough to kill the average adult human.) His public deathbed accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind his poisoning kicked off a media firestorm and a decade-long investigation.