The Act of Killing

I watched The Act of Killing in a couple sittings and couldn’t shake one thought Oppenheimer keeps returning to: imagine if the Nazis had won, and were still alive, still killing, and nobody cared. They’d be on television laughing about it. That’s what happened in Indonesia after the 1965 coup. The men who did the killing are still alive. They’re celebrated. Nobody made them stop.

Oppenheimer followed two contract killers who murdered hundreds of Communists with their own hands, with whatever they had close by, fast and brutal. He asked them to talk about it. To reenact it. They agreed immediately. No hesitation. They’re proud.

What the film does to you isn’t gore—there’s barely any blood on screen. It’s how ordinary they are. Old men in a country that decided to call them patriots, so they just stayed patriots. The propaganda worked. They never had to hide. They never had to regret anything, and so they didn’t. They talk about the murders the way people talk about any job they spent their life doing.

Oppenheimer is Jewish, lost family in the Holocaust. That fact hits different watching his film—he went into a place where the killers are heroes, where nothing was ever called to account, and he just filmed it. Let them speak.

You can watch it free on ARTE for a couple days. Shortened version. It stays with you, not because it’s beautiful or revealing, but because it’s real. These men exist. They’re fine with what they did.