Anwar Congo is a stone-cold killer.

He is also a petty gangster, a wealthy if somewhat eccentric paterfamilias, something of a dandy (never wear white to an interrogation or a political execution), a local celebrity with connections to an abysmally corrupt government, and an aspiring star in his own fantastic, even operatic film. For him, that imagined role of a lifetime is itself embedded in Joshua Oppenheimer’s brutal and hallucinatory documentary, The Act of Killing (2012).

In fact, Anwar Congo is a little man in a big story. A small-time crook and ticket scalper in a city in north Sumatra, he was swept up in the wave of murderous anti-communist violence that followed the military coup against the government of the increasingly authoritarian President Sukarno in 1965. (The background to these events might be known—if sketchily—to American moviegoers via Peter Weir’s haunting 1982 The Year of Living Dangerously, the climax of which puts us in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, at the moment of the coup.) Such petty crooks, or “gangsters,” were widely used by the military government to carry out their program of systematic extermination of known and suspected communists, labor organizers, disaffected peasants and other potential opponents of the new regime. In the course of the film, Anwar himself is alleged to have killed as many as 1,000 people with his own hands, most by strangulation, using a simple device devised from wire and a small block of wood.

Killings of this sort, and perpetrators like Anwar and his cohorts, are of course common currency in the modern world. What makes Anwar and company unique (what separates them, for example, from the Nazi war criminals who scattered like rats in the light after the fall of the Third Reich) is the fact that their work has been heroically incorporated into Indonesian national mythology; that they have been and continue to be adulated rather than held accountable for their crimes; that they have never been subject to the supposedly cleansing acts of confession sought by truth or reconciliation commissions, nor brought to trial in Indonesia or at international venues like the ICC in the Hague; that they remain free in the neighborhoods they once terrorized, living cheek-by-jowl with the descendants of those they tortured and butchered; and that they are thus also free to construct their lives and construe the violence that they perpetrated as best they can.

The lives of these perpetrators and of the families of their victims have been chronicled by the documentarian and MacArthur Fellow Joshua Oppenheimer in a project underway since 2004. To date that project has produced two films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), which examines the north Sumatra violence through the eyes of a survivor, whose family eventually confronts the killer of his brother.

A film noir reenactment scene from Drafthouse Film’s documentary, The Act Of Killing.

The Act of Killing is first of all a tour-de-force of documentary filmmaking.  At times cool and detached (both Errol Morris and Werner Herzog served as executive producers on the project); at others sweaty and oppressive like one of Anwar’s own fever dreams. At its most extreme, like a vision of hell that might have been conjured by Dante or Bosch, the film summons up a world of frightening complexity completely out of joint. It is a world where the term “gangster” can be derived from the concept of “free men” (an etymology repeated again and again); a world where “sadism” refers to a concept of purely cinematic violence; a world where the experience of burying one’s executed father “like a goat by the side of the road” becomes not even “criticism” of political killing, but simply “input for the film” within the film; and a world where a pretend victim can place a medal round the neck of a real executioner as a token of thanks for “killing me and sending me to heaven.” And these instances could be multiplied almost indefinitely. Indeed, the world evoked or chronicled by the film is so vivid in its bizarre immediacy and so [obviously] disconnected from the world of our own lived experience that we can easily forget that the stakes in play are extremely high, and that the filmmaker’s strategy is something of a gamble.

The stake is nothing less than the idea of “history” itself: who makes it, who records it, who legitimates and archives it. And although Anwar’s work of systematic killing has become for Indonesia the stuff of official history, relentlessly enforced on its subject population, Anwar himself claims a more personal agenda in embarking on his own filmmaking project. As he says early in the film, “We, in our simple way, will tell the story of what we did when we were young.” Surely, this must be disingenuous and, alas for Anwar, it appears ever more naïve as Oppenheimer’s own documentary strategy unfolds.

That strategy (essentially giving voice to the perpetrators of horrific and systematic violence, not to speak from confinement or at the bar of [inter]national justice, but rather to reenact that violence while providing their own running commentary) can easily seem suspect, even morally treacherous. Is this documentation …or complicity? And what we see on the screen in some of the scenes of interrogation, or at the re-creation of the massacre and burning of the village of Kampung Kolam: is it simply acting, or is it genuine terror, even reactivated trauma?  These are complicated questions, difficult to answer for this film, and connected to other questions, equally vexing, that inform an entire complex photographic and cinematic genre that documents personal or systematic violence, abuse, torture and related crimes as if from the point-of-view of the perpetrators rather than the victims.

In the context of this particular film, we can construct at least some provisional answers by looking more closely at two central characters: Anwar Congo, the wily old killer at home in the old neighborhood, and Adi Zulkadri, the bespectacled man of the world who returns “home” to collaborate on Anwar’s film project. Both of these men appear deeply disturbed, profoundly dissociated from a past through which they can nevertheless move relatively freely. But they move in radically different ways; and it seems safe to say that both are in some sense trapped, prisoners in cages of their own devising, as the film makes abundantly and brutally clear.

When we first see Zulkadri, disembarking from a plane to meet his old friend (“You never return my calls,” complains Congo.), he is wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Apathetic” in big bold letters, followed by a dictionary-type definition. His is the voice of the hardened criminal: he did what he did, even knifed the father of his Chinese girlfriend, and to hell with the Geneva Conventions and the International Criminal Court. But his is also the voice of reason. Anwar’s film will only go to prove the communist point, that the executioners themselves were in fact the cruel ones, the real sadists. Perhaps the government should offer the relatives an apology: since he and Congo were free agents, they won’t be implicated in any case. (Anwar knows better than this. He lives with survivors and they will “curse us secretly for the rest of their lives.”) In any case, the important thing is to find a way not to feel guilty (!) and “that’s the perspective we must believe in.” Miraculously, this seems to have worked for Zulkadri, who hangs with his family at the mall, taking selfies and trying out exercise machines. Hundreds of thousands dead: he lives in a different universe, on the planet “Relax and Rolex,” and for him one can feel only loathing and contempt.

Anwar, on the other hand, must continue to live in the “real world” of mostly rural north Sumatra, a killer among victims, beset by horrible nightmares, nightmarishly re-created in the interior film. (“Just a nerve disturbance,” opines Zulkadri, and recommends seeing a psychiatrist.) Of all the characters in the film, Anwar is easily the most complex, the trickiest to read, the most open and yet the most opaque. Although he seems genuinely proud of what he has done, he clearly has demons to exorcise, to the extent that the climax of the film within the film comes in a long sequence (which he later shows lovingly to his two grandsons) where Anwar assumes the role of victim, interrogated in a dark room and eventually strangled by Herman, his grotesquely fat and occasionally cross-dressing Man Friday. It is a truly frightening moment, where the violence seems anything but re-created, although Herman himself is far too young to have had first-hand knowledge of the role he [re]enacts. And, like some of the other “innocent victims” of earlier scenes, Anwar appears genuinely traumatized by the events.

Director Joshua Oppenheimer

Later, reflecting on the sequence after seeing it screened on his TV, Anwar relates to the off-camera Oppenheimer (whom he deferentially addresses always as “Joshua”) that he now knows what the people he tortured felt, the loss of dignity, the enveloping terror, the eternal darkness. It is a moment of hard-won pride. To which Oppenheimer replies, as the trap springs shut, that the terror of the actual victims was much greater (a quizzical expression flickers across Anwar’s face) “because you know it is only a film. They knew they were really being killed.” Anwar’s expression now displays the inscrutability of apprehensions eternally incompatible and eternally at war within his broken psyche. He seems almost genuine when he asks, now once again a child, “Have I sinned?” As if he really and truly doesn’t know.

What he does know, however, is that rather than living as if “Born Free” (the gangsters’ anthem and the theme song of the interior film), he is cursed as a creature of the criminal night, crushed under the wheel of “karma,” a thing “like a law [coming] straight from God.” Just before the beginning of the sequence that enacts his own death, as he looks off a pier into the inky blackness, sitting on his haunches and fingering a fishing line so like the instrument of so many of his own crimes, he sums it all up perfectly: “In all this darkness, it’s like we are living at the end of the world.”