The Act of Killing · reception & legacy

How The Act of Killing has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

It landed at festivals in 2012 as an instant event — Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning, hailed as a documentary landmark — and a decade on it hasn't cooled: it's now a fixture near the top of greatest-documentaries-ever lists and a standard answer to 'what's the most disturbing film you've seen?'

What's debated

The fight it still starts: is giving perpetrators a stage to perform their crimes a moral breakthrough or exploitation — a debate crystallised when BBC Storyville's Nick Fraser publicly attacked it while much of the doc world defended it as revelatory.

Its footprint

Werner Herzog's blurb — that he hadn't seen a film 'as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade' — became inseparable from the film, and its lurid musical-number imagery (the waterfall, the giant fish) is instantly recognisable shorthand for documentary surrealism.

Where it stands

A 'you must see it once' modern canon entry — routinely ranked among the greatest documentaries of the century and inevitably paired with its companion piece, The Look of Silence.

Named by the director

Influences Joshua Oppenheimer has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• Jean Rouch — Oppenheimer has repeatedly cited Rouch's ethnofiction method — participants performing versions of themselves for the camera — as a key inspiration for the film's approach.
• Dušan Makavejev — Oppenheimer studied under Makavejev at Harvard and has credited him with shaping his taste for political surrealism and rule-breaking nonfiction.