Indonesia. Gangsters Anwar Congo and Herman Konto recount how they were picked up by the government to join a paramilitary hunting and killing alleged Communists in the country during the Indonesian mass killings of 1 9 6 5-'6 6, and the Cold War. Anwar describes how people suspected of being Communists were brought to an office, interrogated, found guilty, and then strangled by a wire around their neck on a different location. Anwar and Herman re-enact the murders in movie genres, including a Western and a gangster film. Pancasila Youth members support Anwar and Herman. While re-enacting an interrogation with himself playing the victim, Anwar expresses regret and feels devastated.
Excellent documentary "The Act of Killing", one of the best movies of the decade, is a giant contemplation on the notion of "necessary evil". It depicts the rarely mentioned or publicized event of the Indonesian mass killings of 1 9 6 5-'6 6, when at least 500,000 suspected Communists were killed, of which at least half of them were probably innocent, presented through the two executioners, Anwar and Herman, who recount and re-enact how they killed these people. What follows is one of the most haunting and complex ethical debates seen in cinema. On the one hand, they were right: Communism killed at least 50 million people worldwide in the 20th century, was a dangerous ideology of a dictatorship, and Indonesia was just one of many countries that applied the Containment policy which stopped its spread during the Cold War. But on the other hand, so many people were killed that this supression itself reached a disturbing point, reminiscent of the old saying: "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster". It's a trolley problem and lesser of two evils principle thought experiment. Therefore, a large part of the film's crew, including cinematographers, production manager and gaffers, are only credited as "Anonymous".
Rarely were such chilling tales of murders told in such a calm, tranquil manner: Anwar and Herman talk about killing someone as if they are talking about such normal things as buying a cake or drinking coffee. Anwar goes to the location where hundreds of suspected Communists were brought, he then placed a long wire around their necks, and pulled it from two yards away until they were strangled. The bizarre thing is that the director Joshua Oppenheimer allows Anwar and Herman to stage movie clips from their favorite movie genres while depicting these murders, and thus in one such fake movie Anwar plays a cowboy on a horse as he re-enacts killing a Communist in the forrest, while Herman is for some reason dressed in a drag during a horror movie segment, where he feigns he is eating Anwar's liver. Several surreal moments stand out. Anwar recounts a government propaganda film that was made for the audience to hate the Communists, and little kids were ordered to watch it in the cinema, as he says: "Some children were traumtized by the film. But deep inside I was proud because I killed the Communists who look so cruel in the film." Some people go into a debate: "So, the Communists were not more cruel than us!" - "Cruel is totally different from sadistic!" In another, Anwar says how he cut the head of a man and threw the body away in the forest, but he was haunted that he didn't close the eyes of the victim's head. It's fascinating how some people need a justification that the others were a bigger evil as to make their evil less bad or more acceptable, as a psychological method to calm themselves. One deduction from the film is that certain groups still have that primordial bloodthirst that needs to be satisfied by declaring someone the enemy and then killing them. The other is that there are no ideal solutions in the complex world, and that we all live in a Catch 22, where whatever we do, we will regret it, more or less. These characters will stay in your mind rent-free long after the movie is over.
Grade:+++
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