The Act of Killing

To say that there has never been a film like The Act of Killing is a spectacular understatement. It is a simple, straightforward and unembellished documentary that is also one of the most surreal, disturbing, and almost unbelievable non-fiction films I’ve ever seen. Joshua Oppenheimer provides far more than an up-close-and-personal portrait of the unrepentant former leaders of North Sumatra’s most notorious death squad. By inviting his subjects, Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry, to make a movie in which they re-enact their barbarous episodes, Oppenheimer gets as deep into the minds of fascistic mass murderers as any filmmaker could.

Still, it is difficult to fully embrace this film because it provides almost no historical context about the time in which its two main characters transformed from small-time hoods scalping movie tickets into perpetrators of brutal atrocities, purging Indonesia of Communists, suspected Communists, and people who simply didn’t pay them money. But Oppenheimer is not after context. He is interested in exploring how these men view themselves and their actions, and he succeeds brilliantly at that. The resulting film is a chronicle of Congo and Zulkadry’s exploits intercut with genre-movie fantasies they make about, and starring, themselves. The spectacle of these men staging scenes of fake violence for the cameras and utilizing the tropes of gangster films, cowboy movies, and musicals to make themselves feel heroic is at once freakishly comical and pathetically banal.

Oppenheimer uses the movies these killers make in much the same way that Terry Zwigoff uses the artwork of R. Crumb and his brothers in Crumb: as a window for his audience into disturbed minds. The Act of Killing doesn’t quite achieve the perfect combination of voyeurism into that window and contextual understanding of the world around that window that Crumb does, and the proceedings are so bizarrely matter-of-fact that it is often hard to believe the subjects are really acting of their own free will.  But that is also part of what’s so fascinating about this movie. Are we seeing these men as they really are, or are we getting a reality-show version of them, in which they are always aware of how they’re being perceived by the cameras? We learn in the film that many Indonesians don’t present their true selves in public for a number of reasons. The film poses the question: where are the lines between authentic and fake, denial and comprehension, history and legend, fact and recreated fiction? We don’t get many answers to these questions or to the dozens of others that Oppenheimer poses; like most good documentarians, he leaves us to draw our own conclusions.  But this movie is so mystifying and so meandering that I found myself wishing at times for a Werner Herzog-style voice-over, commenting on what it was really like to spend time with these men and to make this film with them.