Jihad Jane

The inter­net is good for pre­cise­ly three things: buy­ing clothes; porn; and being stealth­ily induct­ed into reli­gious and/​or polit­i­cal cults. Cia­rán Cassidy’s fea­ture-length debut is an engross­ing doc­u­men­tary about the lat­ter, the sto­ry of how a woman from Penn­syl­va­nia became a mur­der-plot­ting jihadist after spend­ing too much time in the rab­bit holes of com­ment sections.

The film flits between 2007 and 2011 as Cas­sidy pro­files not only the tit­u­lar Jihad Jane (real name Colleen LaRose) but also her co-con­spir­a­tor Jamie Paulin Ramirez, aka Jihad Jamie. In spite of a strong vérité-like open­ing, the film’s styl­is­tic mode quick­ly set­tles into con­ven­tion­al talk­ing heads and archive footage. Tes­ti­mo­ny from var­i­ous attor­neys is punc­tu­at­ed by still shots of hid­den alley­ways, while web chat rooms on com­put­er screens illus­trate how dig­i­tal extrem­ism lurks clos­er to the sur­face than you might think.

Yet, as the inves­tiga­tive approach begins to wear thin, the por­traits of the so-called ​“home­grown ter­ror­ists” take shape as the recent­ly released sub­jects sit for their first ever filmed inter­views. Cassidy’s patience allows them to reveal a host of con­tra­dic­tions and lack of remorse, par­tic­u­lar­ly with LaRose, who endors­es Trump and says, ​“It feels good to be some­body.” There is a sym­pa­thet­ic angle to the film’s treat­ment of the for­mer al-Qae­da loy­al­ists, delv­ing into their trag­ic life sto­ries and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty behind the veils.

The scope broad­ens to the scandal’s trag­ic con­se­quences, and focus briefly piv­ots to the media fren­zy aimed at LaRose and Ramirez, as well as a con­ver­sa­tion with their tar­get­ed vic­tim, artist Lars Vilks. The Swede had caused offence with obscene draw­ings of Muham­mad and is pre­sent­ed as a mere provo­ca­teur due to a frus­trat­ing hes­i­ta­tion to explore his artis­tic inten­tions. Regard­less, in deal­ing with the increas­ing­ly rel­e­vant threat of rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion, Cassidy’s care­ful­ly humane tone allows for the film to res­onate beyond its story.