Critics reviews

Like all great nonfiction films—and all great films period—The Look of Silence is engaged in unveiling reality. An alternate title for this horror movie about monsters wandering in plain sight—and those who see them for what they are—could be They Live.

A superior companion piece to his 2012 documentary, "The Act of Killing," Joshua Oppenheimer's damningly clear-eyed and compassionate second feature about the 1960s mass killings in Indonesia offers an essential piece of reportage on a still-unanswered historical outrage.

Where Oppenheimer's first documentary on this history, The Act of Killing (2012), valorized the power of the camera, this new companion film supplies a dictionary of gazes... The deft restraint that guides The Look of Silence—perhaps more influenced by Adi's reserve than by Oppenheimer's artistic instinct—contrasts sharply with the proudly lurid excesses of The Act of Killing.

One of the key lessons (a word that I am using with no shame) of the film is that one cannot heal a historical trauma without scratching it... For the victims, the precondition of coming to terms with the past is not to bury the uncomfortable truths, but to force the perpetrators understand the horror they brought to their lives.

The film's form echoes Adi's approach, with measured editing and careful compositions, its controlled outrage expressed as a precise, piercing look at impunity and hypocrisy. The recurrent static shots of Adi watching Oppenheimer's footage of death squad leaders reliving his brother's murder speak volumes to the way that images allow us to process history, whether in celebration or horror.

More subdued but no less haunting than its predecessor, Silence considers the perspective of Indonesians who lost family members in the genocide. The film centers on an optometrist named Adi Rukun, whose older brother was among the many casualties in 1965. In a series of powerful sequences, Rukun confronts some of the men responsible for his brother's death—not with the purpose of shaming these men, but rather so he might forgive them and come to peace.

Anyone who found The Act of Killing unpalatable because of its apparent complicity with its subjects will find The Look of Silence more acceptable—yet the film is hardly easy viewing. The directness and emotional rawness of its content make it in some ways more painful, not only because there is no longer the arguable relief of hellish farce, but also because of the surprising calm and visual beauty that Oppenheimer supplies as a foil to the extremity of the content.

If The Act of Killing was about the smug cocoon of history in which victors regard their own actions, then one could argue that The Look of Silence is about penetrating that cocoon with one's gaze. In the earlier film, cinema itself became something monstrous, a collective myth that fed into the mad dreams of murderous men. This time, however, the image has a reverse power – of testimony and confrontation and maybe even closure.

Easily one of the most courageous and profound documentaries in ages... If the ruling tone of The Act of Killing is barely contained repugnance, The Look of Silence is a model of mournful, if troubling, reflection—a companion piece from the perspective of the survivors.

There's a level of craft in The Look of Silence that arguably exceeds that of the equally but differently devastating Act of Killing, trading formal and visual daring for deliberation, exactitude, and classically calibrated suspense... every moment of The Look of Silence is fully directed. The shots, the performances, the frame, the soundscape: it all supports an idea, it's all marshaled towards an effect, it all freights meaning. There are simple cuts in this film that can buckle your knees.

Oppenheimer's new film, "The Look of Silence," is a deliberate companion piece to "Killing," and it too is strong and upsetting. Its conceptual framework isn't nearly as idiosyncratic as the previous film's, and that could be to its advantage.

While Oppenheimer's doomed-epistemology motif—wherein the perpetrators try on a pair of adjustable frames, inviting countless metaphors about blindness and oversight—is heavy-handed, the results of these face-to-face encounters are too gut-churning for it to matter. Like Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Oppenheimer's film grows more frantic the closer it gets to the truth.