This chilling companion piece to 2012's The Act of Killing may lose much of the surreal spectacle of its predecessor, but it absolutely retains its substance. In fact, this quieter, more insistent film may be the more important of the two, in that it relocates its focus from the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide to the families of its victims, and dares to question the future direction of the country.
The film follows Adi, an optometrist whose older brother was slaughtered horribly before he was born. Through watching footage shot by Joshua Oppenheimer, the film's visionary director, and through conducting interviews with the men responsible, Adi discovers how his brother died, and he attempts to grasp the implications of history and communicate to those responsible the importance of moral responsibility. Yet these are dangerous men who openly admit they drank the blood of their victims, or castrated their sexual organs in order to kill them, and in a country that celebrates their kind as heroes there is little to no motivation to renounce their crimes - instead, they almost relish reliving the grisly details.
Much as the title suggests, there are long period of silence and introspection in The Look of Silence. Adi could become angry over the men's refusal to confront the past, yet instead he engineers gulfs of silence in the interviews - perhaps in the hopes that they will fill the gaps with their guilty ramblings. Of course, unlike The Act of Killing, there are no dramatic moments of realisation to equal Anwar Congo's horrifying rooftop retching - the moments are, instead, more subtle, and relate more to the suffering of the victims. An extraordinary scene occurs when Adi talks to an ex-general and his daughter. The latter accepts the public view of her father as a hero, yet when Adi tells her of the army's tradition of drinking blood to avoid madness, doubts creeps into her face, and she admits that her father sounds like he was a sadist. A connection blossoms between the two - Adi hugs her at the end of the interview, and she tearfully insists that he treat her as family. Out of a horrific moment of history has emerged a culture of shared grief, that infects all those who have been denied answers or justice by a corrupt political system. Among the most affecting victims of the film are Adi's parents: his father is both blind and deaf, being cared for by his stooping, frail mother, and one heartbreaking scene sees him scared and confused, crawling around the floor of a house he does not recognise, as if literally trapped by his own grief.
Indonesia will not change overnight, but both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence at least attempt to hold a complex national culture under the microscope, which makes them nothing less than compulsory viewing. See them together, if you must - though be warned, your soul will not emerge unscathed.
★★★★★
