Review of The Act of Killing (2012) by Jack G — 10 Jul 2013

A traumatic experience cinematically speaking and the most provocative display of finding reality in cinema ever. it makes Cannibal Holocaust look like Sesame Street. I know why I think of thag film. Its the only thing close enough I can think of that comes to that level of viscera.

Only here this is a REAL documentary, about mass murderers (putting it lightly, the main subject under the camera, Anwar Congo, murdered a thousand people reputedly) who all got away with it cause, well, its Indonesia and fuck Communists, especially circa Military takeover.

How the filmmakers get at what they did is most unnerving, where Congo and others reenact such set pieces as interrogations, burning and slaughtering of a village, death by wire strangling, etc. Its so much, too much at times, because as we know sometimes too well, cinema can make things real, closer in the fiction than reality itself (what excutive producer Werner Herzog would call 'ecstatic truth' here becomes that of a nightmare truth).

Its actually what makes such a living monster like Congo, more terrifying than anything, more human in a dimension that others interviewed lack: he knows deep down what he did was wrong, he is haunted, and by the time he shows the filmmakers where the actual killings took place he cant help but heave and vomit.

By the end you still know what he did was horribly unforgivably wrong. What makes the Act of Killing essential as a document, as a piece of history, is they we see him know it, through albeit some surreal set pieces (ie seeing himself being tortured on camera playing the part of one of his victims).

I cant help but recommend the film, despite knowing its more disturbing, soul crushing, and blackly comic than anything in recent memory. Its what happens when meta meets 'movie gangsters'.