In the documentary “The Act of Killing” there is a scene where the men whom had torutured and killed their fellow Cambodian’s returned to a village and re-enacted their crimes. All around them were people – and I remember most of them being women – who had been old enough to remember the killings first hand, had probably never spent a night since without thinking about those horros and were now fafe to face with their tormentors.

Yet the look on their faces is what I remember the most because I don’t think there is a word to describe the emotion they were feeling. These men, the killers, we re-enacting their crimes for fun and were not there to kill anyone but these women wore a mask of entertainment for their “guests” but you could see the confusion, horror, and doubt in their eyes.

For me that was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen.

This story captures a part of what those women felt, that fear but also that unity, even if they will come to a tragic end no matter how proud they stand.

At the end of the story we get images of the wind, and that’s how I imagine evil (the Devil here) works – the Devil all of a sudden appears and there is nothing we can do to stop him till he leaves. Even Bela Tarr used wind imagery in Satantango when we meet the Devil character, similar here as good looking with his impish friend. And that’s probably why the chief’s wife leaves the room before the name is spoken because to hear the name, even of a friend of the Devil is to invite him back.

But that last image of the small man who sort of confesses to the girl he just raped strips away the excuse that a Devil did something evil and places it squarely where the responsibility lay: with humanity. Monsters do not commit these terrible crimes, men (people, though usually men) do. To dehumanize these terrible acts is to look away and let the Devil get away with it, but to know that men do these terrible things means that they can be stopped because men are weak (the image of the men who only drink shows weakness and cowards).

This is a fantastic story.