The Act of Killing

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

(Not rated)

****

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has made “one of the most lucid portraits of evil I’ve ever seen,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. Fascinated by the apparent remorselessness of men who had carried out a mass slaughter in Indonesia nearly 50 years ago, the Texas native convinced several of these butchers to re-enact their horrifying exploits for his cameras—staging the action in whatever cinematic style pleased them most. Though the faux Westerns, gangster dramas, and musicals that the subjects dream up can be “bizarre to the point of trippiness,” Oppenheimer’s film makes the horror inescapable. He’s “obviously treading on dicey moral ground here,” empowering monsters to romanticize their stories, said Bob Mondello in NPR.org. But his intent becomes clearer when one of killers becomes physically ill as the playacting finally causes his demons to surface. The Act of Killing is a movie that will make you run from the theater, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. You’ll run “both to escape the awful things the film is showing you and to tell everyone you know that they need to see it too.”