It’s a mark of The Act Of Killing’s creative ambition that a film about the Indonesian mass murders of 1965-66 manages to create a thematic connection between killers justifying their actions and dancers cavorting in front of a defunct restaurant shaped like a giant fish. Director Joshua Oppenheimer found and interviewed some of the original killers, now in positions of minor power. Unraveling the ways they identified with Hollywood gangsters, he enlisted them to re-create their murders for the cameras, moving from abstract, colorful, and stylized re-enactments to a grotesque realism that throws his subjects off balance. The process brings a grim, awful humor to the process of puncturing their self-images, and trying to bring them to understand and confront their crimes. But while it’s informative, surreal, and astonishingly bold in exploring the psychology of these specific murderers in this specific environment, it reaches significantly further in exploring the banality of evil. As Oppenheimer’s subjects justify their actions, or even boast about the people they framed and slaughtered, they reveal a great deal about the ways people distance themselves from their own actions, and in the process do unconscionable things without feeling the pangs of conscience. Oppenheimer’s film is innovative, stylish, and strange, but it’s also staggeringly important for anyone trying to understand why terrible things happen in the world. —Tasha Robinson
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