Eyes Wide Shut
“I’m in somebody else’s house. How did I get here?” says an elderly man, with deepening fear. He’s blind and deaf, scooting himself across a dusty floor on his knuckles, his voice growing more urgent as his thin fingers reach out to touch the walls of his own home. “Help me,” he cries. “I’ve wandered into a stranger’s house ... He’s going to beat me up!”
There are any number of scenes like this in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breathtaking new documentary The Look of Silence, in which a 44-year-old optometrist named Adi Rukun confronts the men who killed his brother in the 1965 Indonesian genocide of more than a million alleged Communists. The film is laden with similar moments: symbolic and resonant, but rooted in a grim reality. The man crawling on the floor is Adi’s father, who suffers from dementia and is trapped in a surreal nightmare.
The film, which opened, which offered a harrowing look at the aging perpetrators of the U.S.-backed genocide in Indonesia. Today, many of those men are still in power. Celebrated as national heroes, they brag openly about the mass murders they committed, reenacting for Oppenheimer in detail how they strangled, tortured, and beheaded people.
