If you looked on any screening service genre menu, The Dissident would undoubtedly fall in the documentary section. But this is to sell Bryan Fogel’s fascinating non-fiction work short. Examining the murder of Saudi Arabian writer and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, The Dissident mashes up political drama, espionage thriller, crime procedural, love story and horror. Skilfully weaving together these different threads, Fogel’s film explores notions of power, technology, state-sponsored violence and governmental tyranny, emerging as a cogent argument for the need for free speech and a hymn to those who fight to preserve it.
Fogel has all the juice of a true-crime special, but it feels less sensationalism and more like rigorous journalism
At its heart, The Dissident intertwines Khashoggi’s journey from a Saudi monarchy insider to being the regime’s most fervent critic with an investigation into what happened when the journalist, aged 59, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never returned. Using talking heads, embassy footage and transcripts of audio recordings of the actual murder, Fogel pieces together a compelling, hard-to-argue-with account of Khashoggi’s killing, identifying members of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s personal security force as perpetrators of the crime and painting a vivid picture with telling details: the seven-minute strangulation carried out in a bland conference room; the dismemberment of the body with a bone saw; the ordering of 70lbs of meat from a local restaurant to mask the smell of his body parts being burned. Fogel has all the juice of a true-crime special, but it feels less sensationalism and more like rigorous journalism, a cogent anatomy of a political hit.
The Dissident also details Khashoggi’s ally in activism, Omar Abdulaziz, a social media-savvy dissident hiding out in Montreal — there are far too many shots of him walking chilly streets or riding the subway — who taught Khashoggi to use digital media as a form of resistance. There are compelling sections detailing the way the Saudi establishment used Twitter trolls (‘flies’) to shape the country’s narrative by drowning out dissenting voices, and Abdulaziz’s attempts to fight back by creating armies of tweeters (‘bees’). To underline the point, Fogel uses animations of battling insects, the surprising result being that The Dissident occasionally resembles A Bug’s Life. The film is good on Saudi operatives’ use of spyware to gather information too, centring on the bugging of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of Khashoggi’s employer The Washington Post.
Also running through The Dissident is a briefly sketched but still affecting love story. Khashoggi was visiting the Istanbul consulate with Turkish fiancée Hatice Cengiz to pick up documentation relating to their marriage. The film picks up with a crusading Cengiz after the murder as well as showing the way Khashoggi’s death scuppered many of Saudi Arabia’s plans for international growth. Yet perhaps the biggest takeaway, amidst the ‘CSI Istanbul’ procedurals and geo-political subterfuge, is the portrait of Khashoggi: warm, genial and human.