(Drafthouse Films)

The Act of Killing offers strange images the likes of which you have never seen before, exotic dreams of dancing maidens in a landscape of natural beauty and day-glo surrealism. What makes the film so powerful, and so provocative, is that the people whose imaginations spawned these spectacular images killed hundreds of people.

Director Joshua Oppenheimer set out to make a documentary about the victims of Suharto’s Indonesian death squads in the 1960s. The massacres were anti-Communist efforts that, as a title card early in the film points out, were supported by Western governments. Viewers looking for an explicit indictment of American support of brutal foreign dictators will be disappointed. The film vividly brings to life concepts right out of a very American cultural signpost: Quentin Tarantino.

Screen violence in the age of Tarantino and The Sopranos has immersed viewers into the brutal worlds of colorful characters they can identify with, and may even want to hang out with. But those are fictional characters. The Act of Killing, which features Werner Herzog and Errol Morris as executive producers, goes one step further: it draws us into the lives of real men who we find charming and even empathetic despite the fact that they are for the most part unrepentant mass murderers.

When Oppenheimer met the charismatic men who led the death squads, they quickly opened up to the director, not hiding from their actions but in fact boasting of them.
A conventional film would lay out statistics and numbers and a clear moral and investigative arc. But this is not a conventional film, and the subject of its investigation is ultimately internal. On the surface, The Act of Killing is about the Indonesian death squads, but by putting the emphasis on the subjective experience of its characters rather than on objective details, the film becomes universal and more challenging.

(Drafthouse Films)

Most of the people who watch the film never have and will never kill a man. It’s natural to react with horror at seigniorial Anwar Congo and his Falstaffian buddy Herman Koto as they go about their jovial and sometimes paramilitary business. They are monsters, we might well think, and we do. But there comes a point in the film when one looks at these men not as examples of an Other at whom we can point fingers, but as humans we recognize. Brutal, tragic figures out of Shakespeare felled by pride and tormented by ghosts. The title The Act of Killing suggests that murder is after all another form of the act we put on for the world’s stage. The movie is about the fictions we create to justify the lives we lead and the roles we perform.

Oppenheimer took the brave stance of observing his subjects without judgment. He guided his charges through staged reenactments and elaborate fictions, and the results are both harrowing and alarmingly surreal. The film makes us want to hear them and see their visions. But these visions come at a price. Can the fictions we create about ourselves ever mask our horrible crimes?

It would be tempting for a filmmaker to frame such characters into his own received ideas, and as Oppenheimer suggests in interviews, it is impossible to frame reality without creating a kind of fiction. The director steps back as much as he can and lets his characters create their own fiction, the kinds of masks and rationales held to justify their actions, or just to hold the demons at bay. Near the end of the film, we watch as Congo invites his grandchildren to watch some of the footage they made, a neo-noir in which he plays the part of one of his own victims. How do the kids react? Bored, tired of something that to them is just another old person’s story. The Act of Killing asks uncomfortable questions and may raise more questions than it answers. You won’t see a more powerful film this year.

Joshua Oppenheimer will participate in question-and-answer sessions at the Landmark E Street Cinema on Saturday, after the 7 and 10 p.m. screenings, and on Sunday after the 1, 4, and 7 p.m. screenings.

—

The Act of Killing
Directed by Johsua Oppenheimer with Anonymous and Christine Cynn
Not rated
Running time 115 minutes
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema