The Killers Film Themselves
Imagine the Nazis won the war. They’re still here, still in power, and one of them is sitting across from a cheerful talk show host, describing in cheerful detail how he strangled people in 1944—the studio audience laughs along, nobody in the building considers this unusual, and the man goes home afterward to his grandchildren. That thought experiment is the premise of The Act of Killing. Except it’s not a thought experiment. It’s Indonesia, and the men Joshua Oppenheimer is filming are real, and they’re still alive.
In 1965, following a military coup, the Indonesian army organized the mass murder of suspected communists, ethnic Chinese, and political opponents. The death toll is estimated between five hundred thousand and one million. The men who carried it out—paramilitaries, gangsters, death squad operators—were never prosecuted. They became heroes. Some of them still appear on television.
Oppenheimer’s film follows Anwar Congo and his companions, aging men who killed hundreds with their own hands, as they agree to reenact those murders on camera. Not reluctantly. Enthusiastically. They suggest costumes. They debate locations. Congo demonstrates his preferred strangling technique on a rooftop where he once disposed of bodies, then watches the playback and adjusts his performance. The genre they choose for the reenactments shifts throughout—western, gangster film, musical. At one point there’s a waterfall and women in pink dresses.
What Oppenheimer makes from this material is unlike anything else in documentary film. He’s not running a sting operation. He doesn’t need to—these men incriminate themselves freely, without shame, because in the world they inhabit there is nothing to be ashamed of. The horror isn’t in what they admit to. It’s in the casualness of the admission, the way the worst imaginable things have been folded into the texture of ordinary life and left there, undisturbed, for fifty years.
Oppenheimer lost family in the Holocaust. That context is worth holding. This is a filmmaker with a personal relationship to state-organized mass murder who found a country where the perpetrators never faced any reckoning and decided to simply let them speak at length. The result sits in your chest for days afterward—not because it’s traumatizing in the conventional documentary sense, no archival atrocity footage, no survivor testimony—but because it shows you something true about how violence gets remembered, mythologized, and handed down. The killers made themselves into heroes. Their children believe it. The state believes it. The structure holds.
Near the end, Congo plays the role of a victim in one of his own reenactments—one of the communists he would have killed—and something changes in him briefly. He goes back to the rooftop afterward. He gags, repeatedly, into the drain. It may be the most extraordinary scene in the history of documentary cinema. You’re not sure if what you’re watching is the onset of remorse or just an old man’s body finally reacting to something his mind never allowed itself to feel. You’re not entirely sure it matters which.