Mark Reviews Movies: THE DISSIDENT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2020

The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi shook the world. It wasn't just the way he was killed, which was unthinkably brutal. It was that he assassinated in a place that should have been safe—at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was a Saudi citizen, simply trying to obtain the paperwork necessary for his upcoming wedding, and then, a group of men suffocated him and dismembered his body.

All of this is known. All of it was widely reported, after the initial mystery of Khashoggi's disappearance transformed into an official announcement from Saudi Arabian officials that the journalist had died. The official report was that unbelievable at first, and it only became more ridiculous. First, nothing had happened to him. Then, he died from some kind of allergic reaction to something or another, and then, it was alleged he died after getting into a fistfight. Did they think they could get away with such blatant mendacity?

Bryan Fogel's documentary The Dissident wisely doesn't present the known facts as any kind of mystery. Khashoggi went into that consulate. Within minutes, people were upon him. The whole murder was recorded, and Fogel shows us the official, translated transcript. We're not sure which is more horrifying: Khashoggi's pleas for help before he was silenced or the repeated notes that his murderers were laughing during the crime.

There is nothing more to this film than the presentation of the cold, hard facts of what happened inside the Saudi consulate on October 2, 2018, some speculation of what happened to Khashoggi's body after he was killed, the details of the local police and United Nations investigations into the assassination, and a slew of information about how and why Khashoggi became a target of certain members of the Saudi government. Off to the side, there is also the pain and grief of those he left behind, friends and colleagues and a fiancée who wants justice but becomes increasingly doubtful that anything approaching it will come.

One colleague, a fellow and continuing critic of the government of Saudi Arabia, is mourning, too, but he doesn't have much time for it. He is certain, even living in exile in Canada, that he's a target, simply waiting to be killed, too. Time isn't on his side, so the truth must be out there now, before it's too late.

Fogel seems to have a similar attitude. The film may show us the personal side of what Khashoggi's murder means to assorted people, but the filmmaker is, first and foremost, determined to make sure we understand as much as is known about the circumstances of this killing and the broader history of what motivated it.

This is a densely compacted narrative, filled with accounts from a variety of perspectives. It covers almost the entirety of Khashoggi's professional life, from his time working for publications within Saudi Arabia, which kept close ties and gave over lots of control to the country's royal family and government ministries, to his time in exile in the United States, when he started writing for the Washington Post to offer an insider's perspective on Saudi Arabia.

Honestly, it often feels overwhelming. Fogel interviews so many people with so much information and such diverse opinions about what parts of Khashoggi's life and death are the most important to comprehend.

There's his murder, obviously, and the investigations—now complete and absent of any meaningful degree of justice—that uncovered a not-so-vast conspiracy into those who ordered, planned, and committed the crime. We hear from Turkish police officials, who are still dismayed at how blatant the cover-up was and show us video of the investigation. One detective notes that he could smell the cleaning products in the room where the crime happened, and a blacklight reveals a trail of fluid that shows just how confident these criminals were in thinking they'd accomplished their job.

There's his participation in a kind of Twitter war for truth against propaganda, which Khashoggi helped to finance from an idea from Omar Abdulaziz, the journalist currently in exile in Canada. There's a dissection of the Saudi government-sponsored "troll army," known by opponents as "the flies," which buzzes around social media, looking for oppositional information and opinions to essentially silence with overwhelming replies. Abdulaziz planned a counter response in the form of his own army of ordinary Saudi citizens called "the bees," and he and his family and some friends have been suffering for daring to speak against tyranny. A terrifying section shows how the Saudi government could have used a spying program to follow Khashoggi, Abdulaziz, and any dissident's every move and conversation.

There is, in other words, a lot of information here—but not too much. It's all necessary to understand Khashoggi's work, the fear he experienced and others like him experience every day, and the absolutely crushing nature of systems and establishments such as the ones in Saudi Arabia. We lose, perhaps, a bit too much of the personal loss that resulted from Khashoggi's murder, but as long as this continues to happen and the perpetrators of the crime remain free, there simply isn't time for that.

By the end, Fogel, with a lot of help and evidence provided by multiple sources, has basically revealed everything we need to know and more. We know what happened. We know the culprits. We know who didn't let the crime get in the way of an official relationship (a certain outgoing President, probably hoping for some kind of private deal when he's out of that job, being chief among them). If The Dissident ultimately leaves us feeling hopeless by how much happened and how little was done as a result, that's the point.

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