The Act of Killing

Saw The Act of Killing, an extremely uncomfortable documentary on some of the killers in the Indonesian mass killings of "communists" (AKA ethnic Chinese and political undesirables) in the 60s. The filmmaker somehow inveigled these killers into shooting a bat-shit re-enactment of their crimes. The central killer, Anwar, the one we spend most time with, used to work at a cinema as a young man. He talks about leaving the cinema after a really good film, an Elvis film, of going across the street, still carried in the mood of the film, dancing and singing, of offering a detainee a cigarette, and then carrying him off to kill him. "We were like happily killing, joyfully." Horrifying, ugly, weird stuff.

The film revels in the grotesque absurdity of its premise. One of the killers a disgusting fat man (there's a scene of him brushing his teeth, shirtless, his rolls shaking as toothpaste foam drips down his chin) who is inexplicably always dressed as a woman in the film-within-the-film. At one point Anwar recreates his butchery of a baby, cutting up a teddy bear, mocking the fat man who is playing the baby's father, crawling and mewling nearby. As the film progresses, and as more and more scenes are reenacted, we become sickly aware that Anwar is scarred and haunted by his violent past. He is unable to continue filming at one point, overcome. "Is this what my victims felt like? This fear?" "No," the director says, uncharacteristically breaking silence "they felt much much worse because for them it was real."

It's like The Office meets Shoah. A very strange film which cannot avoid being very self-referential. It's about the filming of an internal film, centering on a man who grew up with movies, who was inspired by the cruelty and barbarism of American gangster films. Many times we catch glimpses of Anwar's soul behind the makeup and fake blood. In a few of the scenes I wondered if he was achieving some sort of cleansing through this. Were we watching him kill and torture himself? The film is haunting and strange, eerie and frightening in a very real way. The pretense is always just a hair's breadth from the truth. Such an unsettling film.