Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Starring: Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, Adi Zulkrady
Running Time: 115 minutes
Certificate: 15
Synopsis: A documentary that challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to reenact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers.
THE ACT OF KILLING is a bizarre and strange film. The film chronicles a group of people who were among the responsible for killing over 500,000 (speculated to be as high as between one & three million) suspected communists in the 1960s. That in itself is a horrible fact, but what makes the film strange is how willingly the perpetrators of these crimes and people involved with the current Indonesian regime are willing to not only boast about their deeds, but even go so far as to re-enact scenes of torture and murder in an attempt to educate the younger generations of the country’s history.
The plot becomes more and more grotesque the further it goes on as the gangster, and one of the leaders of the death squads during the genocide, Anwar Congo, talks about how he devised a cleaner and more efficient way of killing people by strangling them with a wire instead of decapitation.We also see them walking around the city trying to recruit children and women to play communists in a bizarre reenactment of how they burned down people’s houses.
As the film progresses, there are flashes of what seems to be guilt from Congo while he still holds on to his illusion that what he did was right, which is brilliantly juxtaposed with the arrival of his old partner in the death squads, Adi Zulkrady, who knows they were cruel but at the same time regrets nothing, even going so far as to express a desire to go to trial for war crimes in Hague because of the fact that he would be famous. What is ultimately scary though is that this film manages to humanise a couple of mass murderers to the point where you sometimes have to remind yourself of the despicable acts they committed in order to not start to sympathise with them, which is an incredible disturbing feeling.
The stark realism of the present-day pure documentary footage interspersed with footage of the almost dreamlike reenactment scenes works mostly well, although the pure strangeness of some of the images (the overweight guerrilla leader Herman Koto in a dress that could best be described as reminiscent of the Chiquita banana lady) leaves a desire for them to perhaps have been used more sparingly as they lose their effectiveness over time and it becomes somewhat tedious. However, this is a minor gripe from a brutally honest portrait about how people (or at the very least some people) can justify anything including genocide as long as they believe in the cause. It’s not a bag of laughs, and rightfully so, but it is completely unforgettable.
[usr=5] THE ACT OF KILLING is available via Dogwoof now.
