A cinematic retelling of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi requires no embellishment. The raw facts are sinister and dramatic in themselves, involving a horrible murder within a consulate in a foreign country, an ambitious prince, intolerant of dissidents and a kingdom with great financial influence. However, Bryan Fogel’s new documentary, “The Dissident”, goes further by deploying an aggressive soundtrack, frantic editing and CGI elements to take home the pathos of Khashoggi’s story and what it reveals about the insidious surveillance machine and repression of Saudi Arabia.
The film begins nowadays with a spy suspense intrigue. In a hotel in Montreal, a young man speaks threateningly on his phone, saying things like “it’s all about revenge” and “if it doesn’t work out cleanly, I’ll use dirty means”. This is Omar Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old Saudi vlogger who lives in exile in Canada and who is talking, we soon learn, about the war on Twitter.
As outspoken critics of the Saudi regime, Abdulaziz and Khashoggi became online friends in 2017, after Khashoggi fled to the United States amid a crackdown on journalists and activists. Days before Khashoggi’s assassination, the two began to collaborate secretly in a social media campaign to fight the army of Twitter trolls who spew out Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s propaganda. Khashoggi was a real insider for many years before becoming critical of his country’s increasingly undemocratic ways; with their plan, says Abdulaziz, Khashoggi has finally become a dissident.
Their collaboration – and their possible role in making Khashoggi a target – is one of the few revelations in “The Dissident”, whose set of talking heads and illustrative footage adds context to the previously reported facts. Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, shares the pair’s correspondence, which paint a moving portrait of Khashoggi as a man who had enjoyed finding company after a difficult separation from his family. In the most disturbing parts of the film, Turkish police and United Nations officials report their investigations of the murder as the screen expands into transcripts of conversations between the men who dismembered Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate. “Do the body and hips fit in a bag like that?” reads a highlighted line.
All of this material is so scary and effective in its own right that the film’s emphatic music and computer-generated graphics – which include a Twitter battle portrayed as a confrontation between 3D flies and bees – may seem overkill. But these flourishes serve the film’s ultimate goal: to deeply impress the injustice of a world where money and geopolitics outweigh human rights.
The dissident
Rated PG-13 for graphic descriptions of violence in real life. In Arabic, Turkish and English, with subtitles. Execution time: 1 hour and 59 minutes. In theaters. Consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies in theaters.