After over one-hundred years of cinema, it's pretty rare to come across a film unlike anything you've seen before, let alone one that begs the question: how the hell did they pull that off? Even though blockbuster films like Gravity try to do this by taking us to great heights (no pun intended) through technological / cinematographic advancements, we somehow end up bored with the result. Who really cares how long and complicated your opening take is if it feels like it lives inside the brain of a computer? Perhaps fiction has been done to death, perhaps we've advanced the tech behind fictional filmmaking so far that it's completely lost touch with reality. This is probably why, today, documentaries have never been more relevant and more capable of blowing your mind. The advantage documentaries have over fiction is that they can show us things so unbelievable they could only exist in the real world. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing is a very special documentary. What begins as a glimpse into the lives of a handful of former death squad leaders, Oppenheimer then invites them to help produce fictional recreations of their killings, recreations mimicking the style of the murderers' favourite Hollywood movies. As the fiction overtakes the lives of its subjects, The Act of Killing becomes what Oppenheimer has described as "a documentary of the imagination." Never before has such nightmarish and surreal terrain been excavated, revealing a chilling indifference to nothing less than unpunished crimes against humanity.

If you've ever tried to imagine what a Nazi conquered world would be like, this documentary might be closest thing we'll ever have to actually knowing. What we discover is that when history is written by the victors, we see something very frightening emerge: acceptance of brutality as not only necessary, but heroic. Aware of how it's so much easier to see the contents of a fishbowl when staring at it from a distance, The Act of Killing positions its viewers in a way that forces us to question our own perspective on how and why things really are in the world, not in the way we've been brainwashed to believe. The murderous thugs Oppenheimer immortalizes are not behind bars, or on trial for war crimes, or any of their crimes; these men are heroes in their native Indonesia, on parade to be adored by their hero-worshipping countrymen and women.

Considering Oppenheimer cast his subjects inside a surreal, hyper-stylized world of fictional recreations, it's impossible to argue The Act of Killing isn't manipulative. But it's the lengths Oppenheimer goes to -- the soaring heights of absurdity these staged recreations go to -- that confirm, whatever moral compass exists, it is not being directed by someone with a hidden agenda. Ultimately, the fictitious pageantry calls attention to how difficult it is for someone to have perspective when they're lost within a concrete belief system cemented by victory, history, and the applause of an entire nation. If you think you wouldn't have been swept away by the mass-hysteria/nationalism excited by the Nazis pre-WW2, then you're lying to yourself as much as you may have been for having bought into Obama's movement for 'Change.' I know I'm guilty of the latter.

Damning as it is, Oppenheimer's surreal world also acts as an arena for 'art' therapy, treatment both logical and plausible for men who've been playing roles their whole lives. Decades ago these gangsters were young, ego-driven, power hungry men who performed the most horrible acts imaginable...and now as old men, they've perfected their roles as heroic cowboys proud of having defended the homestead. But once the act is over and the veil lifted, these men are revealed to be victims of their own acts, sickened by what they've done, who they are, and the 'act' they've clung to in order to preserve their own sanity. To gain access to the minds of characters so repulsive and sinister is something even the best screenwriters couldn't fathom pulling off; to be able to humanize them, and make them sympathetic is a feat of filmmaking unlike anything I've ever watched before.

Something else I've never seen before is a film with one "anonymous" credit, let alone dozens of them, including one given to a co-director. The gravity of this reminds us the killings proudly re-enacted by the film's subjects are not just nostalgic, but very much a part of the today's way of doing business. By the time the credits scroll we realize the real culprit here, the one we cannot pardon, is Capitalism.

The Act of Killing depicts capitalism at its darkest hour, in a special place where brutality and savagery are necessary and applauded. Immersing us in such a dark place, The Act of Killing shows us how difficult it is to identify the outlines of our own faces once the definitions of "truth" and "justice" are mutated beyond recognition. History asks us: How far removed are we from these crimes? Was it not our governments who supported these atrocities? Whether we knew it or not, we collectively turned blind eyes, condoning a genocide that took the lives of over one million people. These are the realizations we should be most sickened and disturbed by, but are we? We enabled these men to kill so who are we to judge, and if the results coincide with our politics, do we even care?

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In 1965, there was a military coup in Indonesia. From then on, paramilitary groups have killed suspect communists as well as many others. The documentarians approached these people involved to reenact their killings. The killers themselves set off to make their own movie about the killings.

The big name in this production is Errol Morris although he was probably just the producer. For obvious reasons, the people involved have remained Anonymous. It's definitely an odd documentary. The killers are all too happy to participate. Most of them see nothing wrong with what they did. However some of them are quite conflicted.

They call themselves Gangsters. At least that's what the translation comes up with. It is a fitting word to describe them. Not only are they killers. They rape, they extort money, and they threaten. IMO this didn't really get real until they start walking around dealing with the regular people. The first scene has them cajoling people to do their movie. I didn't really know what to make of it. Either the people were truly scared or they were truly embarrassed with the attention. When they went out to extort the Chinese store owners, it got real. It's not just them telling stories or reenacting past events. They were being real gangsters right there and then. In the end, these are thugs with excuses. The fact that Herman couldn't get elected says a lot. They may not be as popular as they may believe. The people in power are more willing to put the brutality of the past behind. And I love the people expecting 'gifts' to vote. Obviously corruption goes both ways. There isn't enough fear of them or else the voters would be afraid to demand 'gifts'. They remind me of retired mobsters talking about the good old days.

A documentary that challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to reenact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers.

While the film does lack a bit of historical context (I suspect few Americans know about 1960s Indonesia, Sukarno or Suharto) this is not the point, and that minor criticism can be overlooked. If anything, hopefully this encourages people to look into that time more and learn a few things about this crazy world of ours.

The men featured in this film are a strange lot, arguing that their country suffers from "too much democracy", as they reflect on the days when life was allegedly better under military rule. Constitutional amendments were passed in the late 1990s that effectively ended any sort of dictatorship.

The primary focus is on Anwar Congo, a "movie theater gangster" who is revered as a founding father of the right-wing paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila that grew out of the death squads. If anyone is said to be positively affected by this whole experience, it is Anwar. How sincere or remorseful he truly is only Anwar himself knows, but he does finally seem to come to the realization that he is a mass murderer with an ocean of blood on his hands.

He is sadly the minority. While the general population "gets it" that death squads are probably not right (with one television producer pondering out loud about how he can sleep),the bulk of the former killers are more than happy to make humorous skits and songs about their exploits. With colorful costumes, dancers, beheaded dummies and simulated cannibalism, they gleefully tell the cameras how they killed their victims. This may be the first surreal documentary, putting even Bunuel and Dali to shame.

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges called the film "an important exploration of the complex psychology of mass murderers" and that "it is not the demonized, easily digestible caricature of a mass murderer that most disturbs us. It is the human being." He is on to something here, as these men never come across as "evil", but merely numb or oblivious. While "human" and "humane" may be similar, there is nothing intrinsically necessary about their connection.

In her famous book "The Banality of Evil", philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. If she were alive to see this documentary, she would see her beliefs proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Is this the best documentary of 2013? Probably. While not as timely as "The Square" or "Dirty Wars", it says more about the human condition than most films ever could. To know that these men are the same as we are, only different by the pure chance of where and when they were born, is a terrifying prospect.