'The Dissident' Is a True Crime Documentary That Works Backwards
On 2 October, 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. By now, most people know the story ends with him never coming out again. In a new documentary, we watch footage of the crowds outside the building growing in protest at a brutal, state-sanctioned murder. With every passing day, it becomes harder to ignore the grim reality that a journalist was executed and dismembered by his own government.
The Dissident is the latest film from Bryan Fogel, the director behind the Oscar-winning 2017 documentary Icarus, which delved into the murky world of doping in professional sports. Icarus fell into Fogel's lap after a chance encounter helped him uncover the sophisticated operation that Russia's Olympic team were using to evade performance-enhancing drugs being detected in their urine. Contrastingly, The Dissident operates almost in reverse, starting with the explosive revelation and then peddling back to the ordinary people who were caught up in an assassination which rocked the world.
Unlike your common-or-garden true crime documentary, which inspires us to play detective and help piece together who the killer is, here the shock does not come from discovering who is responsible for executing Khashoggi, but instead in watching how brazenly his murderers carried out such an act, knowing justice would likely never come.
In this sense it mirrors Ryan White's recent documentary Assassins, about how two naive women living in poverty were duped into assassinating Kim Jong-Nam, believing they were part of a prank show. Both films stack up evidence that insulated leaders – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un – were inextricably linked to these murders. There are countless examples of high profile individuals caught on camera, diplomatic passports and state planes, bogus trials conducted in secret, and an endless trail of messages pointing us to the guilty parties. At one point in The Dissident we hear a former member of the CIA say that, in 20 years, they, “have not seen a conclusion that is this confident about the role of one person in an act.”
At one point we read a minute-by-minute account of what happened in the embassy during Khashoggi's last moments, with a gruesome transcript of his killers laughing as they removed his clothes and used a bone saw to dismember him. It is hard to watch, but it does the work of speaking truth to power, which Khashoggi was so determined to do in his own journalism. As the masthead of his paper, The Washington Post, reminds us: democracy dies in darkness.
Like Assassins, The Dissident shows just how powerful a tool social media is in the hands of people who know how to manipulate it. Saudi Arabia is a country where roughly 80 per cent of the population is on Twitter, and the documentary forensically details how the crown has hired thousands of people to manipulate trending topics online and silence those who speak out against it. Such is the power these people wield that Prince Mohammed bin Salman was even able to hack Jeff Bezos's phone, and was likely responsible for the leaking of messages to the National Enquirer, which ended the Amazon founder's marriage.
The words of Khashoggi's close friend, the activist Omar Abdulaziz, and fiancée Hatice Cengiz, who we see appealing to the UN for justice, are a reminder of how people become political pawns in a game beyond their control. As we see a tearful Cengiz say at one point, “I still wonder when all of this will end.”
To understand how this happens, and how we get to the shocking killing that opens the film, Fogel's documentary works backwards, showing us a political climate which isn't inclined to stand up to Saudi Arabia. This is especially apparent when Trump is in power, but doesn't seem to have changed with Biden's tenure, with the president recently declining to take any action on the case. We see that the most shocking part of Khashoggi's horrible murder was that the Saudi leadership was right: they knew they could get away with it.
The Dissident is available from Glasgow film festival, 6-9 March, Dublin film festival on 11 March and on digital formats later in the year
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