The Look of Silence Reviews

Since I really loved ‘The Act of Killing’, I was of course really eager to watch Joshua Oppenheimer's directing follow-up, especially since it was some kind of sequel to ‘The Act of Killing’. Well, even though even it turned out be a more straightforward documentary than his previous directing effort, I was still really impressed and pretty much floored by the damned thing. In my opinion, this movie is such a deep dive into the human soul and it was just fascinating to behold. I mean, this genocide in Indonesia was just the stuff of nightmare and it pretty much gives us a glimpse of what might have happened if the Nazis wouldn’t have been defeated and would still be in power nowadays. Obviously, this tragedy has been a huge trauma for the Indonesian people and it was just so fascinating to see how the people interviewed were dealing with this. Of course, if it would have been a US fictional feature, there would have been some tears and people apologizing for their deeds but the end-result was here so much more complex. I mean, you could see on their face that, very deep down, they somehow were aware that something terrible actually took place but it was buried so deep under a huge amount of denial, propaganda, decades of brainwashing, gossip, fear,… You could even see the ripple effect it had on the children of the perpetrators but even the victims were struggling to deal with these events (for example, it is rather unlikely that Adi’s mother suddenly found out 40 years later that her own brother was a guard in one of these jails). Eventually, it is quite amazing that, from such a horror, the makers managed to deliver something so humanistic. Anyway, to conclude, it turned out to be another fascinating documentary from Oppenheimer and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in this subject.