Doc most chilling film of year
You’ve never seen anything like The Act of Killing, a documentary in which mass murderers recreate their crimes, making a film to show how people were garroted or beheaded, and an entire village was once massacred: Women raped, children tortured, men killed. It’s a movie within a movie, enacted by the actual men who did the crimes in the mid-1960s when there was a military coup in Indonesia and more than a million “communists” — union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, ethnic Chinese — were murdered. The job fell to paramilitary organizations and to a group of gangsters (they claim the word means “free men” in English) who got their start scalping movie tickets outside a cinema.
Today they walk around free, unpunished heroes in a country where a politician will tell a paramilitary group that Indonesia needs more gangsters, not fewer.
As one of the killers says, guilt is relative: After all, Guantanamo was a good thing during the Bush years.
At the heart of this extraordinary movie, however, is the darkness of unalloyed cruelty. It’s personified by a man named Anwar Congo, who killed 1,000 people with his own hands, mostly by tightening metal wires around their necks because the traditional method of beating them to death became too messy.
He picked up the wire trick from gangster movies. The killers in The Act of Killing are frustrated ham actors, and Congo mentions Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and John Wayne as personal favourites.
He admits that he tried to look cool by dressing like a movie star, but he says, “I didn’t copy Elvis Presley,” as if some things are sacred.
The Act of Killing is at once horrifying and surreal. It begins with a scene of brightly clad dancers coming out of the mouth of a giant fish while a voice says, “Don’t let the camera catch you looking bad.”
A waterfall flows picturesquely behind them. A fat man — whom we’ll come to know as another paramilitary leader — sits alongside, dressed in a bright turquoise gown.
This is the fantasy sequence of the film they’re making. Director Joshua Oppenheimer (assisted by co-director Christine Cynn and “Anonymous”) asked Congo and the others to recreate their murders any way they wanted.
As movie fans, they decided to make a film. They recruited ordinary citizens to play terrorized civilians — some of them were actual terrorized citizens, forced to re-enter the nightmare years — coached them in how to beg or look terrified, and then filmed it to show us how it was done.
They do this openly, without shame or regret, although at some stages, they seem to realize how it looks.
The leader of the Pancasila, a paramilitary youth group, watches the horror of the staged village massacre and says: “We shouldn’t look brutal. We shouldn’t look like we want to drink people’s blood.” It hurts the group’s image.
While the killers are unabashedly candid about the extent of their outrages, the notion of image begins to enter the picture. Congo is excited about the film, saying he can make something that is even more sadistic than movies about Nazis.
But he also admits he has pangs of guilt and nightmares, especially about a man whom he beheaded with a machete and who stared back at him with lifeless open eyes. (Another killer who comes to visit him — wearing a T-shirt that says Apathetic — advises him that “the key is to find a way not to feel guilty.”) The act of making a movie about the past becomes the way in which Congo can finally see the reality of what happened.
He plays a victim in some scenes — sequences that give us a terrifying glimpse into the reality of being held and interrogated by torturers — and it opens his eyes.
For years, he used drugs, alcohol and dancing the cha-cha to help him forget his crimes (his cha-cha is especially bizarre) but by the end, he is physically ill with the reality of it. It’s a small note of humanity in what is the most chilling movie of the year.