Joshua Oppenheimer's bloody documentary restaging a wave of mass killings in 1960s Indonesia leaves our critic dumbfounded
This bone-chilling documentary opens with a quote from Voltaire ("All murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers, and to the sound of trumpets"), which gives way to the sight of dancers emerging from a giant fish, a black-clad priest and man in garish electric-blue drag conducting some ecstatic service at the foot of a waterfall, while a directorial voice commands: "Smile! Don't let the cameras catch you looking bad!" The film ends with the sound of someone retching up their tortured soul, an awful, growling, vomitous howl, like an anguished demon being wrenched from a fragile body. In between, we find ourselves looking long into an abyss in which unspeakable horror and utterly mundane madness are thrown together in the existential equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider – fact and fiction meeting head on with quietly earth-shattering results.
In the wake of a failed coup in Indonesia in the mid-60s, more than a million people were murdered in a bloody anti-communist cull. Many of the killings – and the persecutions that followed – were carried out by gangsters who have not only escaped prosecution, but are now heralded as local heroes. Attempting to understand the open-ended legacy of such unpunished atrocities, film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer not only interviewed the killers (whose actions are anything but hidden) but asked them to stage dramatic reconstructions of their (non-)crimes, to "create scenes about the killings in whatever way they wished". His title, "The Act of Killing", encapsulates this duality, not only examining the awful reality of murder, but also staging its re-enactment. Like some horrendous real-life version of Man Bites Dog, we spend the next two hours in the company of laughing, joking mass-murderers, blithely revisiting their blood-drenched past in a manner that is at once insanely surreal and distressingly domestic.
"It was as if we were killing… happily," says the elderly Anwar Congo, recalling the heyday of legitimised slaughter, demonstrating the easiest way to strangle a man with a length of wire and a piece of wood. Decapitations are re-enacted with cheap make-up and gory props, livers fed to gawping dead heads. Movies are a constant topic of conversation, with the techniques and fashion tips of Hollywood's outlaw icons providing perverse inspiration for hustlers whose mantra is that "gangster" means "free man". Video playback prompts complaints that a killer would never have worn white trousers on the job, and a discussion of the influence of sadistic movies that these would-be film-stars promise to surpass.
Most shocking of all is the recreation of an attack upon a village in which families were burned out of their homes and butchered, during the filming of which one subject jokes about the rape of children in off-hand terms that defy either description or repetition. At this point, we appear to have reached the nadir of the human condition, the very heart of darkness. Yet in the midst of this horror, something begins to dawn upon the killers; the idea that what they are doing might be wrong. Crucially, it all begins with appearances. "We shouldn't look brutal," says the leader of the Pancasila youth, after watching a baying mob whipping themselves into an axe-wielding frenzy. "We shouldn't look like we want to drink people's blood – that's dangerous… for the image of the organisation." Slowly and inexorably, the power of drama, and of the moving image, start to take hold. "I never thought it would look so bad," says a witness who barely flinched at real murder, but who is visibly shaken by this fictional recreation. Role reversals add to the impact, with killers playing their victims, stumbling toward something resembling empathy, seeing their own actions as if for the first time – finally real, only when unreal.
Interspersed with such harrowing footage are the surreal musical sequences in which the ghosts of the dead appear at the foot of a waterfall to thank their killers for sending them to heaven; even in his most hallucinogenic moments, Alejandro Jodorowsky himself could not have dreamed up images to match such eeriness. At times, these sequences look like outtakes from Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, while an excerpt from a television chat show gaily applauding massacres rivals the most outlandish media satires of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. The stamp of approval lent by executive producers Errol Morris (who brilliantly dissected the fog of war) and Werner Herzog (who once told me that "I am not afraid of anything"), is significant, their names jointly personifying both the stark realism and poetic metaphysics of the unflinching documentary form.
This is never an easy film to watch, not least because of the apparent complicity and co-operation of those who wreaked such inhuman havoc – the word "Anonymous" appears frequently (and ominously) in the credits. Yet perhaps those fleeting, dawning moments of self-realisation are justification enough, the nagging voices of self-doubt offering a glimmer of hope: "We murdered people and were never punished"; "Even God has secrets"; "Not everything true is good"; "Have I sinned?" From the sea bed of this vast sickness rises the infinitesimal voice of self-awareness – the distant echo of some long-forgotten conscience, captured on camera at the moment of its birth. After two hours, I was left dumbfounded. A longer cut will be screened with film-maker Q&A as part of a special "Director's Tour"; both versions will be available on DVD in November.