Movie review of “The Look of Silence”: A man seeks his brother’s killers in Joshua Oppenheimer follow-up to his 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing,” about the 1960s Indonesian genocide.
In a long history of moviegoing, I’ve seen few films as harrowing to watch as Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing.” The director’s follow-up, “The Look of Silence,” is nearly as powerful.
The subject is the killing of from half a million to a million Indonesians in 1965-66, after an attempted coup that eventually led to the ouster of President Sukarno. The victims were labeled communists, a term that was stretched to include anyone the army disliked.