It's Only a Movie, It's Only a Movie...

It seems almost obscene for me to be categorizing The Act of Killing (2012, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer) as any kind of genre film, given that its subjects are men who committed mass murder with impunity in the 1966 Indonesian civil war, but the film itself invites the viewer to deal with the horror it's depicting through the lens of film. Its conceit is that the men involved recreate their atrocities on film. The result, as both the global project that is The Act of Killing and the scenes within authored by its subjects is a derangement that you might get if Abbas Kairostami, Alejandro Jodorowski, and John Waters had collaborated on a mondo documentary. This is a tough film to watch.

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