THE ACT OF KILLING

THE ACT OF KILLING Review

By Darin Skaggs

     There have been so many telling’s in film about the Holocaust and Nazis that it seems that this tragic event in our history has become a work of hard to watch fiction.  Documentaries have helped see the true tragedy of the events, like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.  A more recent depiction of the horrors of humanity is in the documentary The Act of Killing, which is about Indonesian death squad leaders who are recounting the many murders that they committed and are viewed highly of.  They also recount these murders through the format of making their own film based on their life.

     Anwar Congo is the leader of this group.  He and many others performed all of these murders of people they believed to be bad back in the late sixties.  Many scenes pop up where they are describing or acting out how they would murder and the way they felt about it.  At points it might remained you of Dexter or other serial killer products, these men have no remorse and seem to be ignorance to what they have done.  Then throughout the film you realize you are watching a documentary and all of what these men pronounce is truth.  The film is hard to watch; more so than other “truth telling” films like 12 Years a Slave, which is based on memoirs.  Rarely do you get to speak to the bad guy in real life and see what he thinks.  It is absolutely horrifying.

     The film is hard to watch.  Yet, at times it is kind of funny.  They are making this film of their actions.  There is one “actor” in which the roles he plays is always a woman.  The acting is terrible and there are odd musical sequences.  Even though these moments do release the tiniest bit of tension, they are often met with you choking on your laughter with the torture scenes getting too realistic or the actors playing victims bursting into tears for the shear horror of pretending to go through this.

     There are several moments where you think these men have lost any emotional connection to humanity.  They constantly speak of loving gangster characters in movies they had watched or how Congo would have never worn white pants during murders as he reviews footage of him demonstrating how he used to kill people.  That is brilliantly the beginning of the film to get a sense of these people’s disconnection to emotions.  The latter half of the film has some of these people coming to realizations, maybe for the first time, of the weight of their actions.

     The horror of this film is that it is something that has really happened.  These men go on so long not realizing what they have done, some probably don’t know to this day.  It is one of the most harrowing documentaries ever made.