A documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer. In Indonesian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

In The Look of Silence, travelling optometrist Adi pulls out his bag and affixes surreal-looking, red-and-black lenses to people’s faces. Ostensibly, he’s trying to help his Indonesian town’s aging residents to see, but more metaphorically, he’s also trying to make them view the region’s gruesome history clearly.

Silence isn’t as formally impressive as its earlier companion piece, The Act of Killing, in which American director Joshua Oppenheimer coaxed old—and shockingly remorseless—gangsters to re-enact on camera the massacres of hundreds of thousands of “communists” in the mid ’60s. Here, the optometrist, whose own brother was brutally gutted and dumped in the river during the propaganda-driven purge, quietly confronts three of these senior perpetrators (who still wield power and fear in Indonesia today).

The effects can be chilling: the withered braggarts boast and laugh as they talk about drinking their victims’ blood and castrating them with knives, but grow angry when Adi pushes with deeper moral questions, yelling, “The past is the past!”

The only nagging issue is that the setup of the eye appointments feels slightly contrived. It’s not that these monsters don’t deserve to be manipulated, but you may find yourself wondering whether the questions are Adi’s or the filmmaker’s.

What’s more obvious is that those questions are dangerous, raising the ire of still-powerful bullies who remain worshipped as heroes. Adding to the ominous atmosphere are Oppenheimer’s richly composed visuals—the ugliness of the acts being recalled set incongruously against a jungle paradise, the air thick with cricket and cicada buzzing.

Hopefully, this odd, urgent film, like The Act of Killing, will help the rest of the world to see Indonesia’s history more clearly too—note that many of the gangsters credit America’s hatred of communism with their carnage. Then, finally, the past might no longer be the past.