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The Look of Silence

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Denmark, Indonesia, Finland · 2014
Rated PG-13 · 1h 43m
Director Joshua Oppenheimer
Starring Adi Rukun, M.Y. Basrun, Amir Hasan, Inong
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 people saying?

What are critics saying?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.

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.

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