A stretch of placid water in rural Indonesia known as Snake River has borne witness to many unspeakable acts of killing. One such brutal butchering was of a young man called Ramli, caught on the wrong side of the country’s 1965 "communist purges" and messily executed, his remains thrown, along with those of countless others, into the water. “No one would buy fish,” chuckles one of the perpetrators—because everyone around knew the fish were feeding on human remains. If Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” was a full-throated scream, his follow-up “The Look of Silence” is an ululating lament, a drawn-out wail of grief that sounds almost like a song, albeit a harrowing one. And it may feel like the aftershock following the seismic event that was its Oscar-nominated precursor, but it’s an aftershock whose power is not diminished, merely transformed. While the shock-of-the-new impact of his previous film is of course lesser in this return to the same territory, Oppenheimer has found new tones and textures that make the spellbinding “The Look of Silence” equal to "The Act of Killing" in almost every other way.
44-year-old Adi is central to the film: born two years after his brother Ramli was murdered, he’s now a village optician with children of his own and remains close to his aged parents. His father, near-blind, near-deaf and crippled, is cared for by his mother, who herself gradually emerges as one of the most unforgettable characters in a film lousy with them. Adi and his mother have a kind of understanding between them that no one else quite shares: he may never have known his brother, but the fact of his death seems like an open wound that this quiet, thoughtful, watchful man has felt all his life, just as his mother still feels Ramli’s absence. Spurred, it is implied, by Oppenheimer showing Adi some of the footage of the killers that was shot during the 8-year gestation period of the “The Act of Killing,” Adi sets out, often through the white-lie subterfuge of an eye exam, to interview the men he knows were responsible for Ramli’s death.
Watching Adi view the scenes on television is an essay in itself, and Oppenheimer finds a hypnotic variation of poetry in his calm, telegenic, impassive face as he absorbs the gruesome but gleefully told details of his brother’s death. Indeed, Adi possesses almost superhuman restraint, which tempers the interviews with these monstrous men whom he has just cause to despise and to fear. Several of them threaten him—as in ‘Killing,’ these men are respected, often wealthy members of the community, sometimes even serving in the local legislature. Thus Adi’s respectful assurances that “I don’t mean to insult you” are not always enough to quell a sudden, cornered-dog-style lashing when they realize they’re being politely but resolutely confronted. “Do you mean to continue with this Communist activity?” asks one subject, referring to the filming. And later when his mother chides him to “be careful,” it’s because what Adi is doing is truly dangerous. And therefore, deeply courageous.
READ MORE: Watch: New Trailer For ‘The Look Of Silence’ Plus 50-Minute Talk With Director Joshua Oppenheimer
But before the interviews go off the rails, as they do on several occasions, new revelations deliver the same disturbing, solar-plexus kick that “The Act of Killing” specialized in. Chief among them is the casually mentioned fact that at least two of these men believed that drinking their victims’ blood was the only thing that kept them from going crazy. There is a morbid hilarity to anyone blithely asserting such a thing and not realizing that if you’re drinking human blood (“both salty and sweet,” apparently) by any reasonable measure of the word crazy, you’re already totally batshit.
Shifting his focus from the attackers to the victims, Oppenheimer undoubtedly manipulates the narrative, and occasionally allows digressions that in not being strictly relevant to the documentary’s intent could almost be read as prurient. The scene of Adi’s enfeebled father crawling around a room he does not recognize and in vocal distress at being so helpless is brilliant as a metaphor but borderline exploitative as an observed moment. As is the lingering shots of his naked, skeletal form as his wife washes him down, or the closeups of his gurning, toothless mouth. Yet it is in these moments and others like them that it becomes clear just what a visionary filmmaker Oppenheimer is and how much he has matured in the last few years. They illustrate an audacious desire to overtly mould and shape his film to the degree that it strains at the leash of the traditional documentary format, if it doesn’t entirely redefine it. It’s as compellingly crafted, in its use of imagery and especially in its soundtrack, marked by the almost perpetual whine of crickets that makes the titular silence audible, as any narrative film.
We can’t be absolutely sure that the film, executive produced by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, would be as evocative to anyone who had not already seen “The Act of Killing,” as that film made such a permanent, lasting impression on us that we felt well acquainted with background that here is rendered in a few terse lines of text—it is definitely best approached as a companion piece. This film possesses a narrower remit, and perhaps a more familiar premise, in that its concerned with the victims of a grotesquely tragic injustice and their search for some kind of catharsis. But it’s also the story of the remarkable effort of will it takes to stare straight into the dark heart of a mass murder that everyone else (even other victims) wants forgotten. And Oppenheimer’s skill as a storyteller seems boundless, especially enhanced by having such an extraordinarily sympathetic on-camera interviewer as Adi.
The film does not stab as deeply at the schizoid moral hypocrisy of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as its peerless predecessor, but instead offers an extraordinarily poignant, desperately upsetting meditation on the legacy of those killings, and on the bravery required to seek any kind of truth about them. This is a society in which two mass murderers can revisit the scene of their crimes decades later, recount the stomach-churning mutilation of a man who was someone’s son and someone’s brother, then pose for a photo and flick a peace sign. But “The Look of Silence” tells us it’s also a place where amidst the moral degradation and abject horror you can find astounding people, like Adi, determined to reclaim the buried, scuffed-over past and to meet it with unending compassion and grace. [A]
This is a reprint of our review from the 2014 Venice Film Festival.
@Daren, yes indeed I found out the very same thing re that scene when I interviewed Oppenheimer — that interview is now up (posted July 16th, can\’t link in comments, but if you click the Oppenheimer tag above you\’ll get there) and has a lot of context about that moment, if you are interested. Thanks for stopping by.
I don\’t know if anybody reads these (ex-Dissolver looking for a new home) but I saw a Q&A with Joshua Oppenheimer last week and I wanted to add some context to that "exploitative" scene late in the movie with the father. I had the same reaction as most every other reviewer while watching that scene. But Oppenheimer explained that that was the first scene that made him want to make a follow-up to "The Act of Killing". And he didn\’t even shoot it. It was shot by Adi. Oppenheimer had told Adi that Adi\’s idea of confronting the killers in interviews was too dangerous and that he didn\’t want to do it. But Adi showed him that scene that he\’d shot, following his father around their house, and told Joshua that it was too late for his father, but not too late for his children. I\’m doing a poor job of paraphrasing him now but, Adi felt that his father was trapped in fear, and that he had no way out. Adi hoped that in the act of confronting the evil that still dominated his community, he could save victims (re: the people of Indonesia) from ending up like his father. Scared and alone in what is supposed to be one\’s own private sanctuary: their home.
These two films together are two of the most powerful and convicting (for me, as an American) films I\’ve ever seen. I hope they make it into film school curriculums, though they should make it into all AMERICAN curriculums. Or maybe I should just tell people I know to watch it. I need to have more realistic expectations.
I liked that in Art of Killing, there was a brief mention, almost a throwaway line of why these guys could never be tried in the International Court. The answer, of course, is that such a trial would deeply shame the United States, which implicitly allowed the butchery to happen. At the time, Indonesia was in the American camp, and so, "cracking down on Communists" was something of course our government could not condemn without raising a thorny debate in our own country. Ultimately, these guys took their cues from us, and we could have stopped these slaughters at any point if our government had just given a nod. Of course, we\’re not responsible for Indonesian lives, and it\’s not like our government told them to butcher their political opponents or to use such savage methods, but I like that Oppenheimer shows that our hands are not clean either.