Dissident: Doc on Murdered Journalist Jamal Khashoggi Paints Picture of Extraordinary Evil

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

A personal tragedy, a political outrage, and a grisly crime documentary, The Dissident recounts the assassination of the 60-year-old Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul to get a marriage license. His killers were waiting. Istanbul police concluded that he was taken into a meeting room where he suffocated to death, dismembered, and burned, as one of his killers is heard saying on an audio tape, “like a sacrificial animal.”

The news accounts of the murder, and President Trump’s dismissal of calls to sanction the Saudis, are generally well-known. Filmmaker Bryan Fogel, who previously directed Icarus — the Oscar-winning documentary on the Russian doping scandal — offers essential context to the gruesome crime.

Although The Dissident is, arguably, unnecessarily juiced-up with the editing and scoring of a Hollywood thriller, the excesses are balanced by the procedural rigour worthy of a crack prosecutor. For background, Fogel places Khashoggi’s killing in a geo-political context, including the Saudi regime funding the backlash to the Arab democracy movement of the past decade and particularly, the use of social media and sophisticated cyber-surveillance to control dissidents at home and abroad.

We learn more about the role of Saudi royal family and Muhammad Bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, its officially reform-minded but ruthlessly ambitious young crown prince and friend of Jared Kushner, who Khashoggi had antagonized in his columns for The Washington Post.

As part of that context, Fogel also takes us to Montreal, home-in-exile for 27-year-old Omar Abdulaziz, one of Khashoggi’s friends and a fellow critic of the Saudi regime trying to organize against the Saudi regime while staying out of its reach.

Khashoggi offered both advice and money for Abdulaziz’s dissident campaign, enlisting dissident Twitter users with multiple accounts to counter-act state propaganda. (According to the film, while two out of 10 Americans are on Twitter, eight of 10 Saudis use the platform, making it a powerful tool of political influence).

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Both the CIA and the United Nations implicated MBS and the Saudi government in Khashoggi’s killing. The film also suggests his vengeance is as petty as it is cruel. We hear from a cyber-security expert who concludes that Bin Salman was behind the hacking of Jeff Bezos’s phone, leading to the world’s richest man’s humiliating marital scandal.

The leak was apparently in retaliation after Bezos, in the wake of Khashoggi’s killing, cancelled a Saudi visit as a guest speaker at a major Saudi investment conference. Bezos owns The Washington Post, where the journalist’s columns had appeared.

Fogel also interviews Khashoggi’s devastated Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who waited for four hours outside the embassy for her partner to return, and another two weeks before the Saudi government confirmed his death.

Along with Khashoggi’s journalistic colleagues, she paints a picture of a man of innocent idealism and belief in the possibility of democratic reform to the Arab world. While it may be an overused term, Khashoggi was a martyr to the cause of free speech. His killing was conducted by, and abetted by, extraordinarily vicious people who are determined to retain and abuse their power.

The Dissident. Directed by Bryan Fogel. Written by Bryan Fogel and Mark Monroe. Available for streaming from January 8 through itunes, Amazon and Roku.