100
IndieWire by Eric Kohn
Compared to "The Act of Killing," Oppenheimer's technique with The Look of Silence is deceptively simple, but it applies a more traditional style of documentary storytelling to extraordinary goals.
The Look of Silence
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- Denmark,
- Indonesia,
- Finland,
- Norway,
- United Kingdom,
- Israel,
- France,
- United States,
- Germany,
- Netherlands
- 2014
- · 103m
Director
Joshua Oppenheimer
Cast
Adi Rukun,
M.Y. Basrun,
Amir Hasan,
Inong,
Kemat
Genre
History,
Documentary
Adi, born after the Indonesian genocide, is the youngest son from a family of survivors. His brother's killers have been in power ever since the massacre, and, as with the majority of the perpetrators, maintain an unspoken reign of terror over the population. Despite the dangerous circumstances, Adi breaks the silence and bravely questions the murderers, one by one.
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What are critics saying?
100
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
100
CineVue by John Bleasdale
Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.
100
Variety by Guy Lodge
So involving is the raw content of The Look of Silence that some might view its formal elegance as mere luxury, yet the film reveals Oppenheimer to be a documentary stylist of evolving grace and sophistication.
100
The Playlist by Jessica Kiang
The film does not stab as deeply in laying bare the schizoid moral hypocrisy of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as its peerless predecessor, but instead offers an extraordinarily poignant, desperately upsetting meditation on the legacy of those killings, and on the bravery required to seek any kind of truth about them.
100
Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf
A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.
100
The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd
The Look Of Silence is a powerful gesture of political rebellion, one whose boldest action isn’t damning mass murderers to their faces, but being willing to believe that their stranglehold on country and history could be broken.
100
Empire by David Hughes
As bleak, unflinching and utterly unmissable as its predecessor.
100
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
A painful, profoundly empathetic work of moral reckoning.
100
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
His film makes it clear that these monstrous humans are very much a part of our species. In a way, I wish I’d never seen The Look of Silence, because now I won’t be able to forget it. But that’s the point, and the film’s purpose—calling attention to the cost of staying silent, and willfully forgetful, in the face of implacable evil.
90
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
The Look of Silence is perhaps even more riveting for focusing on one man’s personal search for answers as he bravely confronts his brother’s killers.
80
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
This is an essential companion piece to Oppenheimer’s earlier film; another astonishing heart-of-darkness voyage into the jungle of human nature.
52
TheWrap by Alonso Duralde
The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.
50
Slant Magazine by James Lattimer
If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it's in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
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