Essentially, we are visiting a lot of the same people who planned and executed the military coup in Indonesia, people who are still in power in many cases and continue to think of themselves as heroes routing out communists. As I say, this is much more personal, though, because here we’re going to follow the journey of one man (someone roughly my age) confronting the men who admit to having killed his brother.
The Act of Killing is not what would typically be thought of as a horror film because there is nothing supernatural on hand for us. Hell, it’s not even fiction. Because of this, because the horrors that we are seeing, while simulated and not truly real, are all the more terrible because these are reconstructions of what really happened. The idea of the film—mass killings and executions not from the perspective of the villains but from those who committed the acts of atrocity is unique in my experience, although there are certainly moments of this in a film like Shoah. This is a more than sobering experience. This is a true show of horror and terror, one that I think it is impossible to watch without being deeply affected and without walking away with a strong feeling of revulsion.
I’m going to do my best not to wax to philosophic when discussing this film, but that might be completely impossible. The Act of Killing is evidence that nothing we can create in fiction as a species, no horror we can concoct can match that which we are capable of in reality. “Man’s inhumanity to Man” doesn’t begin to cover it. And see, there I go waxing philosophic in the very paragraph where I said I would try not to. That these dangers are still real and these events still happen is evidenced by the number of people who worked on this film credited as “Anonymous,” afraid of reprisals even now, fifty years after the events depicted.
