The Look of Silence · reception & legacy
2014 · Joshua Oppenheimer
How The Look of Silence has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
No flop-to-classic arc here — it landed acclaimed (Grand Jury Prize at Venice 2014, an Oscar nomination) and has stayed there; if anything has shifted, it's that more people now call it the equal or better of its famous companion piece, The Act of Killing.
What's debated
The perennial cinephile debate: which is the greater film, The Act of Killing's surreal perpetrator theatre or this one's quiet, devastating restraint — with a vocal camp insisting the quieter film cuts deeper.
Its footprint
The image of optometrist Adi Rukun fitting eye-test lenses on the men he's questioning has become one of documentary cinema's most referenced metaphors — and the end credits, filled with 'Anonymous' where Indonesian crew names should be, are a statement in themselves.
Where it stands
Half of one of the great documentary diptychs — the standard cinephile line is that you haven't really seen The Act of Killing until you've seen this too.