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Critics Consensus: Raw, terrifying, and painfully difficult to watch, The Act of Killing offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema.
Critic Consensus: Raw, terrifying, and painfully difficult to watch, The Act of Killing offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema.
All Critics (145) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (138) | Rotten (7)
It all makes sense when you submit yourself to Oppenheimer's bizarre, tragic, and eye-opening experiment.
Bizarre, hypnotic, audacious.
The emotional places this troubling movie takes him to are rewardingly primal and potent, forcing both subject and viewer to wrestle with internal demons.
I certainly do not move that the film should be suppressed, only that one should know what it is. It is a bath in a smiling madness.
This stunning "documentary of the imagination" shows Anwar and other thugs staging scenes of torture and murder for the camera.
In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer pulls off the impossible: He confronts great, incomprehensible evil and puts a human face on it.
To take Anwar's own dramatic projection of his gradual humanisation seems a much more murky and less conclusive process than Oppenheimer wants to tidily present us with.
What makes the film so powerful, and so provocative, is that the people whose imaginations spawned these spectacular images killed hundreds of people.
Philosophically rich, visually stunning, emotionally devastating.
Rarely has the full potential of cinema itself been brought home so forcefully.
The result is something we've never seen before - a new type of film - call it psycho-documentary - that's not just about mass crimes but the state of mind that produced them.
[An] innovative piece of filmmaking so breathtakingly daring and powerful, it replaces your oxygen with awe.
A shocking and terrifying film that sets out to investigate the twisted minds and souls of death squad leaders in Indonesia, growing to become a disturbing panorama of a society and offering a unique sort of moral confrontation which could only be possible through Cinema.
Super Reviewer
Documentarians ask the leaders of Indonesian death squads to reenact their crimes. There are some incredibly absurd moments in the reenactments of various fifty-year-old murders, including one of the henchmen dressing up in drag for no discernible reason. But the heart of this documentary is compelling the film's primary subject to face his own flagging, ignored conscience. It takes a while, and there are blithe pronouncements about death and killing that make one's stomach turn, but the film eventually pays off. Overall, the gimmick of the film, the reenactments, seems a little weird, but the premise is still compelling.
These may be the most absurd two hours of film I'll ever see. Though this documentary follows many mass murderers as they set out to make a movie boasting about their genocidal slaughters, it focuses in on Anwar Congo. Among these killers, Anwar made the biggest name for himself with his apathy and creativity. At the beginning of the documentary, he upholds his image as an untouchable, joyful and easy-going celebrity "free man." With a smile and tools in hand, he casually recalls and demonstrates his methods. Over the course of these two hours however, his internal transformation is the only thing that will make any sense. The footage here is astounding, and raises an overwhelming amount of questions about Indonesia's history and it's current state, as well as America and the UK's own culpability.
While extremely painful to watch, "The Act of Killing" displays a brutally honest story about the life of Anwar Congo, a gangster who helped the mob kill millions of communists. This film displays he himself re-enacting scenes of actual events that he remembers from the past. He puts on display for the world to see, the horrific ways of killing people and sometimes you feel like throwing up while you are watching. Anwar begins to realize that even though what he did back then was legal, he himself, after personally experiencing the effects, has a complete turn around with his feelings. This film is something that needs to be shown to the world, but only to those who are mature enough to view. I will never say I love this film, based on it's subject matter, but it is a brilliant documentary that almost feels like a shoe-in for the Oscars. "The Act of Killing" is superb in it's messages.
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