Arrival

I watched Arrival last night. I had been looking forward to it before it came out but it was marred due to a small personal reason which kept me disengaged, but also because I had read the story it is based on and the only real suspense was in seeing how they filmed something I had thought unfilmable. The evening before we watched The Look of Silence, a remarkable piece and definitely the highlight of the weekend. It complements Joshua Oppenheimer’s earlier The Act of Killing, which was a surreal-seeming documentary about the perpetrators of mass killings in Indonesia, and in this an optometrist, Adi, meets the killers of his older brother. The protagonist is a remarkable man, with a face that is still and yet so expressive in the face of horrors. The family twisted and crushed by trauma and living amidst killers – there was a scene at the very end which brought this home brutally, and which I later read was filmed by Adi himself.