The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing

Opening Shot

A giant fish. A chorus line of dancers. A tropical waterfall. Anwar Congo, who personally killed approximately a thousand people during the 1965-66 Indonesian purges, stands in front of this spectacle and smiles. Joshua Oppenheimer opens with an image that looks like a fever dream and is actually a movie set: Congo and his fellow death squad leaders are making a film about their killings, restaged as the genre movies they loved. The disconnect between what you're seeing and what you know is the entire film's operating principle.

What It Does

Carlos Arango de Montis and Lars Skree photograph the re-enactments and the behind-the-scenes material with identical visual weight. The Western sequence. The noir sequence. The musical number. The real conversations where the killers discuss technique. The camera makes no distinction between performance and testimony, because the killers make no distinction. This is the most radical documentary choice Oppenheimer makes: he lets the perpetrators control the aesthetic and then films the aesthetic cracking.

There is no original score. The music comes from the genre re-enactments and from Indonesian pop culture: campaign rallies, television variety shows, the cultural infrastructure of a society built on unpunished mass murder. The silence when the re-enactments stop and the real conversations begin is louder than any score.

Anwar Congo's arc is the film's reason for existing. He begins as a boastful, charismatic old man demonstrating strangulation techniques on a rooftop. Over the course of the re-enactments, something happens to him. Playing the victim in one scene, wearing a hood, seated at a desk where he used to kill, he asks: "Did the people I interrogated feel the way I feel here?" Oppenheimer answers: "Actually, the people you interrogated felt much worse because they knew they were going to die." Congo's face changes. He dry-heaves on the rooftop where he demonstrated killings in the opening. The re-enactment broke something his decades of impunity couldn't reach.

Why It's on the List

The Act of Killing proves that documentary can access psychological territory that fiction can't. No screenplay could have invented Anwar Congo's arc because no audience would believe it. A mass killer commissioned to make a vanity film about his crimes instead makes the film that indicts him, and the mechanism of indictment is the act of filmmaking itself. Oppenheimer created a new form: the documentary as mirror, where the subject doesn't realize what they're revealing until the revelation is irreversible.

The Argument Against

The ethical questions are real and unresolved. Oppenheimer gave killers a platform, resources, and creative control, and the argument that the result justifies the method is exactly the argument that every ethically compromised documentary makes. Some critics find the genre re-enactments exploitative of the victims, who have no voice in the film (Oppenheimer's companion film, The Look of Silence, addresses this). And Congo's final breakdown, while extraordinary, is ambiguous enough that interpreting it as genuine remorse requires a generosity the evidence doesn't fully support.

Closing Image

Anwar Congo returns to the rooftop. He gags. He retches. Nothing comes up. His body convulses with something his face can't name. The camera watches. Oppenheimer doesn't cut away. The gagging goes on longer than comfort allows. Whatever is happening to Anwar Congo, it is not resolution. It is not justice. It is a man's body rejecting something his mind allowed for fifty years. The rooftop is empty. The city continues below.