Review of The Act of Killing (2012) by Kenneth L — 01 Mar 2014

This film is certainly one-of-a-kind, which might be reason enough in itself to see it. There's never been another movie like this, and there probably won't ever be again. The film is a documentary about the genocide that took place in Indonesia following the military coup there in 1965.

Rather than giving a straightforward historical account of the events, however, or even interviewing the survivors and families of the victims, Joshua Oppenheimer, the film's director, gave the cameras to a few of the perpetrators of the genocide - self-styled "gangsters" including Anwar Congo, a seemingly self-satisfied old man who personally killed around 1000 people, many of them by strangulation with wires.

Oppenheimer then asked the murderers to reenact scenes of their past deeds in whatever way they wished. The resulting film that we get is a mixture of conventional, on-the-street documentary footage; snippets of the finished products of their reenactments, styled to look like gangster movies, horror movies, musicals, and so on; and behind-the-scenes footage, as it were, of the making of the reenactments.

The editing of this film, the decisions of what to show and what order to show it in, must have been immensely complex. For a while the movie feels a little as if it's simply drifting from one anecdote of murder to the next, but the last few minutes really tie everything together in an incredibly powerful and cohesive way.

If what we see here is to be believed, the process of reenacting his past murders, and then of watching his own reenactments as an audience member himself, fundamentally transforms Congo's understanding of himself and his past, in a way that nearly fifty years of having time to think about it apparently had never done.

If that's all true, this movie is among other things a testament to the power of cinema, to its ability to make us identify with others and understand things from different perspectives. There's also some unconsciously hilarious stuff going on in the movie, such as nearly every appearance by Herman Koto, an enormously obese thug who apparently takes the opportunity of making a movie to indulge a long-repressed desire to cross-dress as often as possible.

It's very hard to figure this movie out in its particulars, due to many layers of artifice (created both by Oppenheimer and by his subjects), cultural barriers, and the just plain insanity of much of what we see.

By the end, though, the film makes its point in a way that is crystal-clear and that works brilliantly. It's on Netflix Instant, so I recommend finding it there.