Citizenfour is different. It is a movie in which we, as the public subject to the policies unveiled by Edward Snowden, are members of the cast. We already know its beginning, middle, and end, and probably have some strong opinions about its main character. Thus, the impact of Citizenfour is not in the reenactment of the 2013 revelations, but how its intimate perspective shifts our understanding of a story we thought we knew.

As the third part of a documentary trilogy from activist filmmaker Laura Poitras, Citizenfour complements two earlier films, My Country, My Country (2010) and The Oath (2006), whose plots revolve around the theme of U.S. government surveillance in a post-9/11 America. These two films play a unique role in the production of the third: Snowden contacted Poitras because the movies identified her as critical of the U.S. government’s surveillance methods in its War on Terror. She was someone he knew would be comfortable with the secrecy needed to decipher his encrypted emails (Poitras has been the subject of surveillance and had already taken measures to secure her personal data), and who he thought he’d be able to trust.

Needless to say, the role of a documentary film director is not usually shrouded in secrecy, nor is the director usually so integral to the events she is trying to record. In the Hong Kong hotel where the majority of the film takes place, Poitras was not only orchestrating the dissemination of the NSA files—to do so, she recruited journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, of The Guardian—but also attempting to capture footage and create a narrative around the then 29-year-old Snowden, whose moniker in those first emails was simply “Citizenfour.”

Shifting the focus to Snowden was perhaps the only option left to the filmmaker when, like a production of Romeo and Juliet, the end of the movie cannot be a surprise. Poitras masterfully confronts the unique challenge of creating suspense by inciting her audience to empathize with the—until now—characterless Snowden. The suspense sets in not only when the viewer begins to empathize with Snowden, but also realize that his struggle is not his alone.

As I walked out of the theater, I realized I had to reevauluate everything I believed about Snowden and the NSA. With Citizenfour, we can assign a real identity to an internationally polarizing figure beyond that of a vigilante. We see him in a bathrobe, fixing his hair, putting his contacts in. We see the worry in his eyes when he talks about his girlfriend’s interrogation. Further, we hear the passion in his voice when he explains why he chose to give up his freedom; he repeats throughout the film his certainty that he will never be able to resume normal life. Poitras shows a Snowden that is less a rebel than a moralist who has found himself in what he perceives to be an unjust institution and is seized by an unshakable desire to upend the status quo. We hear the growing disgust and even incredulity in his voice when he describes the tactics of the NSA, and understand the grave danger our privacy is in we when he declares: “This isn’t my issue, it’s everybody’s issue.”