Butler's Cinema Scene

Jamal Khashoggi, Hatice Cengiz

“THE DISSIDENT” My rating: B+ (Amazon Prime)

119 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

By now the world is pretty unanimous in its conviction that on Oct. 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered while visiting his country’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey.

Furthermore, it is widely accepted that the execution was carried out at the behest of Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who was furious at Khashoggi’s criticism of his regime in stories in The Washington Post and other news outlets.

Given all this, it’s doubtful that Bryan Fogel’s scathing documentary “The Dissident” is going to change many minds.  Most of us are already on board.

And yet here’s the thing:  This documentary is still capable of setting us back on our heels with gut-clutching revelations.

There is, for example, a transcript of the sound recording (uncovered by Turkish police) of Khashoggi’s real-time murder (he was strangled and suffocated in an embassy meeting room).  Earlier on the same tape a member of the hit squad imported from Saudi Arabia — a forensics expert — jokes that he’s never had to dismember a body on the floor before.  Even hunters, he notes, hang their prey upright for butchering.

And how about the revelation that in the days before the murder the embassy purchased 80 pounds of meat,  meat that investigators believe was barbecued to cover the smell of burning human flesh?

Prince Mohammed Bin Salman

“The Dissident” is littered with little bombshells like that.  Perhaps even more important, though, is the cumulative effect of the mounds of evidence delivered by Fogel’s film.  By the time this documentary concludes it has built an aura of sadness and outrage almost too intense for words.

The film covers Khashoggi’s life as an Saudi insider who eventually became disillusioned with his country’s corruption and restrictions on the press,  fled to the West (divorcing his wife so as to minimize the backlash on her and their children) and found a new life as the most important commentator on Saudi life and politics.

We hear from the Turkish cops who investigated Khashoggi’s disappearance (despite world-class foot-dragging by the Saudi authorities); they’re pretty sure the journalist’s remains may be found in an off-limits well in the basement of the Saudi ambassador’s home in Istanbul.

Large chunks of “The Dissident” are devoted to Omar Abdulaziz, a fellow Saudi exile and dissident now living in Canada and perennially on the run from Saudi death squads, and to Hatice Cengiz, the Turkish scientist who was engaged to Khashoggi at the time of his disappearance and who continues the effort to keep his struggle alive.

We get comments from former CIA director John Brennan, who says the international intelligence community has no doubts about how Khashoggi died, and news footage of former President Trump prevaricating (not that anyone expected him to take a moral stand, especially after priding himself on a billion-dollar deal to sell American arms to the Saudis).

Throughout Fogel’s film takes a measured, dispassionate approach.  No hysterics, no grandstanding.

The facts speak for themselves.

| Robert W. Butler