The Act of Killing
A film in which the organizers of mass killings in 1960s Indonesia are invited to reenact their own crimes in the film genres they love — and the camera records how their self-glorification slowly turns against them.
Director Joshua Oppenheimer approaches former Indonesian paramilitaries who personally took part in the mass killings of suspected communists in 1965–66, and instead of a conventional investigation, invites them to direct and perform scenes about their own crimes in the film genres they love — gangster noir, the western, the musical revue. These men were never punished and remain influential, even celebrated figures in present-day Indonesia, a fact that makes the film possible at all: they agree to appear on camera without fear of consequences and, at first, openly relish the attention.
The central figure, Anwar Congo, opens the film cheerfully demonstrating a wire-garroting technique he invented to kill without too much blood, with an almost boastful ease, and then, as the staged scenes force him to physically inhabit the roles of both victim and executioner, his confidence begins to crack. Oppenheimer adds no explanatory voiceover and never judges his subjects directly; instead he constructs a situation in which the viewer has to watch a slow, agonizing process in which restaging one's own past turns out to be far less controllable for a killer than he expected.
The film operates on several levels at once: as a document of impunity and of how a state and a society can rewrite mass violence into a heroic myth, as an experiment in what theatrical reenactment is capable of unearthing from what has been repressed, and as an unusually courageous study of what happens to a human psyche when it is asked not merely to describe what it did but to physically perform it again in front of a camera and colleagues.
The film's ending is among the most difficult in documentary cinema of recent decades, and it finally strips away any ambiguity left over from the genre play of the opening scenes. What remains afterward is less shock at the specific historical events than an unsettling question about the mechanisms that let executioners live long, honored lives by telling themselves and others a convenient version of their own history — and about what happens when that version finally stops holding together.
Key ideas
- The film has the organizers of mass killings direct and perform scenes about their own crimes in the genres they love, turning reenactment into an instrument rather than mere provocation.
- The impunity and social esteem these men enjoy in present-day Indonesia is the precondition for their willingness to appear on camera and speak openly at all.
- As the staged scenes progress, the confidence of central figure Anwar Congo gradually cracks — theatrically reliving the past proves far less controllable than simply narrating it.
- The director deliberately withholds voiceover commentary and direct judgment of his subjects, forcing the viewer to sit through the material's mounting weight unassisted.
- The film functions simultaneously as a document of how mass violence gets rewritten into heroic myth and as an experiment in theater's capacity to unearth what has been repressed.
Related moments
- The Seventh Seal (1957)
A knight back from the Crusades into a plague-stricken land plays a game against Death, less to buy time than to force an answer to whether God exists at all.
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
A silent film about the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, shot almost entirely in close-up on her face — a study of what faith looks like when pushed to the outer edge of human endurance.
- Free Solo (2018)
A film documenting climber Alex Honnold's ropeless ascent of the three-thousand-foot face of El Capitan — one in which the camera crew fears for its subject's life as much as the audience does.
- A Separation (2011)
A family drama that, through one domestic conflict, unfolds into a precise study of how truth, protective lies, and competing notions of duty coexist inside ordinary people.