THE ACT OF KILLING (review)

Review by Mark Wensel

Last night, I watched one of the most harrowing, disturbing and important documentaries that I’ve ever seen.

It’s not the most structured documentary (it seems to jump around in time in ways that are a little bit confusing) or informative when it comes to the history of the events (it seems to have been made for people who grew up in the region and already know the history better than I do), but it packs an emotional wallop and delves into the subject deeper than most of us probably want to go.

The movie was called The Act Of Killing and the subject was basically genocide. It’s about the gangsters who were hired by the Indonesian government in the mid-60s to wipe out Communists.

And, by “wipe out,” I mean that they killed them in many horrible ways, lying about their reasons.

And now they’re treated like heroes.

The director, Joshua Oppenheimer, met with these dangerous men fifty years after they basically took control of the country and tasked them with making short films based on their acts. They could do it in any style they wanted. Some wanted to make a film in the style of their favorite gangster movies. Some wanted to make a musical number. Some decided on just a straight ahead drama. All of them cut to the bone.

These men are living embodiment of the word “monster” and Oppenheimer’s film shows them for what they are. The men talk about the past as if they were talking about the big game in high school that changed their lives. “Remember when we raped those women?” “Yeah! That was great! We did some amazing stuff back then!”

It’s not just the gangsters, but the entire country is implicated.

The newspaper man who changed the answers to interrogation questions in order to get people killed. The bubbly talk show host and audience who applaud when one of the men talks about the old days. The whole country enabled these men to do whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted.

For the first hour of the film, I just wanted to get away from these men.

The evil pouring off of the screen was just a bit too much. It didn’t help that the context wasn’t fully fleshed out for the audience. Then something happened. One of the men said what I didn’t want to think about: what they did was really no different from what Americans did to Native Americans. We killed people, tortured them, burned their houses and then made it seem like they were the bad guys.

THAT is why this movie needs to be seen. This isn’t a problem that we can shuffle off by saying, “Oh, that only happens in THOSE countries.” No. It happens everywhere. Even in “the land of the free.” What’s worse is that it could happen again.

There is no real violence shown in the film and they don’t even talk about the murders in a super-graphic way, but this is a film for a strong stomach.

After two hours of being with these men, I felt sick.

And that’s the way it should be.