Bryan Fogel’s 2020 documentary The Dissident combines at least these three layers of watching, adding much-needed nuance and complexity to the problem of where to look and what to watch in an age when digital surveillance has run amok. The Dissident is a gripping and well-paced investigation of the assassination of Saudi journalist, Washington Post columnist, and free speech proponent Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s name shot into international headlines in 2018 after he visited his nation’s consular building in Istanbul, Turkey, to receive a marriage record, only to be strangled and dismembered. While concentrated entirely on the political struggles and misfortune of Khashoggi, The Dissident admirably balances the intimate and geopolitical threads woven throughout his last years and his final persecution. Each thread has a voice that carries it. The personal and human dimensions are narrated by his bereaved fiancé, Hatice Cengiz, and the geopolitical dimensions of weaponised media told by the Saudi exile and dissident Omar Abdulaziz. Their two testimonies are combined with and remade by a third voice, that of the documentary itself, which is by turns personal and political, intimate and civic. In this merger of witnesses, the film does more than just investigate the brazen murder of a political journalist; it also asks its audience to consider the layers of watching and being watched that constitute personhood in the twenty-first century.

The dangers of state surveillance and digital propaganda are omnipresent in The Dissident. The film tells, for instance, of how the spyware software Pegasus, developed by the Israeli cyberwar company NSO Group, was used by the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman to hack the phones of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as well as exiled Saudi critics who spoke out against his reign. By extension, another of the film’s concerns is the state’s ability to manipulate supposedly free and open media platforms like Twitter. In Saudi Arabia, eight per cent of the population is on the platform. After Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia for his first state visit as president, a weird and ominous photo of him and Saudi royals did the rounds on social media. There they stood, pressing their hands to a luminescent globe, world leaders performing some inscrutable séance. Actually, this globe is the centrepiece of the kingdom’s official troll-farm, where posts from thousands of fake Twitter accounts keep the Prince’s hashtags trending and silence critics through targeted harassment.

Jamal Khashoggi and his partner, Hatice Cengiz, in a still from The Dissident (Madman Films)

The Dissident feels more like a riveting piece of spy fiction than a documentary, reminiscent of Laura Poitras’s profile of Edward Snowden, Citizenfour (2014). While the outpouring of Netflix documentaries over the past five years has given a once marginal and staid genre a new coolness, non-fiction film today lives through an often overblown, nourish, and conspiratorial sensationalism. Rarely does subject matter warrant the tone as much as in Poitras’s and Fogels’ efforts. At the same time, form and content here overlap within contemporary cinema’s general spectacle of watching. The Dissident opens with drone footage of Montreal’s cityscape, as if a proxy for the US and European hunt-and-kill drones hovering over Yemen in service of the war that the Saudis and Emiratis have been waging there for seven years.

Everyone should watch The Dissident. Unfortunately, out of a reluctance to roil the Saudis, major streamers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have opted out, meaning that too few will. For Australian audiences, perhaps the political pitfalls the film exposes would appear remote anyway, unlikely to trap citizens of a liberal democracy. Talking to my students about surveillance, I inevitably get the response ‘I don’t have anything to hide anyway’, an overly popular sentiment that combines naiveté and privilege in equal dose. As netizens, internet users are not just in a liberal democracy but distributed across many sovereignties, vulnerable in the extreme and in ways they may not imagine or foresee. To those with nothing to hide: who is it that you presume is watching? Concentrations of state and corporate power, advanced by netizens’ volitional sacrifice of their privacy, do not end only in personalised advertisements but, as the Khashoggi affair indicates, can have much more chilling outcomes. If we are witnessing the transition from capitalism to what political scientist Jodi Dean calls neo-feudalism, personalised and microtargeted spectacles of violence may find wider footing. While documentary’s merger with paranoia has its limits, as in some of the self-satirising exaggerations of the Netflix variety, a cinema of public caution, in the example of The Dissident, might awaken the audiences who watch it. And watch out. For cinema can look to the civic stability and human dignity of the future, giving it a voice, one that is far from guaranteed.

The Dissident (Madman Films), 119 minutes, is showing in cinemas from 22 April 2020.