A documentary filmed in the feverish heart of a nightmare. An essay on memory that takes the form of a flamboyant and macabre musical. A treatise on the banality of evil staged by its own smiling executioners. Joshua Oppenheimer's “The Act of Killing” is an impossible cinematic architecture, an unidentified object that floats with terrifying grace between testimony and hallucination, forcing us to recalibrate our very definition of cinema of the real. If the camera is traditionally a window on the world, here it becomes a distorting mirror, an alchemical catalyst that transforms impunity into performance and confession into a Hollywood parody.

The device deployed by Oppenheimer is as diabolical as it is ingenious. In Indonesia, where the anti-communist coup of 1965 led to the massacre of over a million people, those responsible for the killings not only live free, but are celebrated as founding heroes of the nation. Oppenheimer does not just interview them. He offers them something unheard of: the chance to dramatize their deeds, to reenact the mass murders in the style of their favorite film genres. And they, former street gangsters (the so-called preman, from “free man”) who by their own admission were inspired by the films of Marlon Brando, John Wayne, and Al Pacino, accept with blood-curdling enthusiasm. The result is an unprecedented ethical and aesthetic short circuit, a film within a film where westerns, noir, and musicals become the languages used to narrate horror.

Anwar Congo, the protagonist, is a figure who seems to have sprung from the pen of a Dostoevsky on amphetamines. An elegant grandfather, with an easy smile and gentle manners, who describes with meticulous precision the most effective method of strangling a person with a piece of wire, before launching into an improvised cha-cha-cha. His psyche is the real landscape explored by the film. The process of “making cinema” becomes an unexpected psychoanalytic journey for him. By staging the past, Anwar is not simply remembering; he is constructing a narrative to justify, embellish, and ultimately monumentalize himself. But cinema, this machine of fiction, proves to be a double-edged sword. By dint of representing horror, horror begins to look back. As in a J.G. Ballard story, where perversion lurks in the most blatant normality, the surreal and kitsch sequences—such as the musical number in which the victims thank Anwar from paradise at the foot of a waterfall—do not diminish the violence, but reveal its deepest root: a grotesque and desperate search for meaning.

The film operates on a level of meta-reflection that brings to mind the most radical practices of modernism. There is an echo of Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt: the viewer is constantly aware of the staging. The cameras are visible, discussions about the script are part of the film, mistakes and laughter on set are included in the editing. This alienation does not create distance, but a terrifying intimacy. It prevents us from relegating Anwar and his accomplices to the comfortable category of “monsters.” We see them as human beings who play, who brag, who worry about the quality of their zombie makeup, who discuss whether a scene is “dramatic” enough. And in this humanity, in this prosaic organization of extermination, lies the film's most shocking insight, an almost literal embodiment of Hannah Arendt's concept of “the banality of evil.” These are not cold bureaucrats like Eichmann, but men whose imaginations have been shaped by American pop culture. They killed feeling like gangsters in a Scorsese film, and now Oppenheimer offers them the sequel.

The film thus becomes a spectral analysis of the power of images. If, as Godard claimed, cinema is truth 24 times per second, “The Act of Killing” shows us how lies can be constructed at the same speed. The preman did not just commit genocide; they won the battle for its narrative. They control the media, indoctrinate young people with their version of history, and the film itself, with its proposal of glorification, becomes the culmination of this process of self-absolution. Yet this is precisely where the twist lies. Oppenheimer's camera, seemingly complicit, proves to be a powerful chemical reagent. When Anwar plays the part of one of his victims during a violent reenactment, something inside him breaks. The fiction becomes too real. The body, more honest than the mind, rebels. The famous final scene, in which Anwar is shaken by retching on the roof where he once killed, is one of the most powerful moments in the history of documentary film. It is not an easy catharsis, it is not redemption. It is the total collapse of the narrative. It is language that fails, leaving only the gasping of a body that can no longer contain the weight of what it has done. It is the failure of cinema as a tool of lies and its triumph as a revealer of an inarticulate truth.

Alongside Anwar are equally significant figures. Herman Koto, his corpulent and histrionic companion, embodies the farcical aspect of power, always ready to dress up and exaggerate, like a Falstaff dropped into a Shakespearean drama. And then there is Adi Zulkadry, the intellectual of the group, lucid and unrepentant, who explains with chilling rationality that ‘war crime’ is a term defined by the victors and that morality is only a matter of public relations. If Anwar represents unconscious torment, Adi is the conscience that has actively and philosophically chosen evil, finding peace in his own ruthlessness.

With its aesthetic that blends the rawness of cinéma vérité with the visionary quality of an Alejandro Jodorowsky film, “The Act of Killing” transcends the documentary genre. It is closer to a work such as Pasolini's “Salò,” which used the ritualization and aestheticization of violence to reveal the nature of fascist power. But while Pasolini created an allegorical fiction, Oppenheimer finds allegory directly in reality, letting his subjects construct their own, very personal descent into hell. It is a film that offers no easy answers, that neither condemns nor absolves in a didactic way. It leaves us alone, in the darkness of the theater, to question ourselves about the mechanisms of memory, the blurred line between history and fiction, and the frightening ease with which human beings can transform mass murder into an anecdote to be told in front of a camera, perhaps with the right background music. A profound masterpiece, a black mirror that, by showing us the smiling face of the executioner, ends up reflecting a dark fragment of our own humanity.