Imagine (as another commentator has said) going to a region of Germany today and finding the Nazis in control, and celebrated for their success and their methods. This film will convince you that human nature is more varied and incomprehensible than you had imagined.

In the mid-1960s there was a military coup in Indonesia. Roughly a million people died at that time. Labeled "communists," many of them, in the usual way, were union leaders, ethnic Chinese, members of the wrong political party, or just people someone didn't like. Joshua Oppenheimer's film, released in 2013, introduces us to some of the perpetrators of these crimes in northern Sumatra, ranging from common thugs to government ministers.

Oppenheimer began by talking to families of the victims, but eventually (the film was almost a decade in the making) realized that the killers were willing and even eager to tell their own stories. The result is so astonishing that there are moments when half of the audience may be gasping in shocked horror while the other half are laughing. One of the two principal characters is a fat lout named Herman Koto, and the other, who calls himself Anwar Congo, bears a disconcerting resemblance to Nelson Mandela. They explain that they began their careers as petty criminals scalping movie tickets (one suspects that coercion may have been involved), and when the socialists tried to ban American films, they had to kill them. 

An Elvis movie would put them in the right mood for mayhem, and they would emerge from the mezzanine dancing and murderous. Anwar returns to the scene, a low roof-top, to re-enact these events for the documentary camera, explaining that at first there was too much blood and it smelled, but then Al Pacino showed him how to use wire. But although we also meet higher-ups who are more chilling, this pair seem more like endearing buffoons than psychopaths -- not to diminish the atrocities. You have to see it to believe it, and even then you won't. At least half a dozen scenes are more bizarre than anything I have mentioned -- by turns chilling and comic, often both simultaneously.

This film has been a festival sensation, and appeared on more than one best-of-2013 list. It played for at least a month in Toronto, but it seems to me that documentaries about Argentina and Romania on similar themes have received more attention, and I wonder why. In the ongoing effort to come to grips with the banality of evil, this film ranks with Shoah and the documentary of the trial of Eichmann. It could have been called "The Banality and the Buffoonery."

I can't help adding this: Democracy Watch ranks countries into three broad categories. According to them, Indonesia is "democratic," while Malaysia is "partly democratic." Of course, that's just one opinion.