The Look of SilenceMovies like The Look of Silence
- Key Features:
- Documentary, Historical trauma, Genocide, Political violence, Human rights, Thailand, Social injustice, Personal narrative, Survivor, Grief, Reconciliation
- Tone:
- serious, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Documentary viewers, Human rights advocates, History enthusiasts
- Emotional Arc:
- Inquiry → Confrontation → Reflection
The Look of Silence

An optician grapples with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, during which his older brother was exterminated.
The Look of Silence
In this chilling and groundbreaking documentary, former Indonesian death squad leaders reenact their real-life mass killings in the style of various film genres, from gangster epics to musicals. As they recreate their past atrocities, the line between reality and performance blurs, exposing the lingering impact of Indonesia’s 1965-66 anti-communist purge and the unsettling psychology of its perpetrators.

The story of the tortuous struggle against the silence of the victims of the dictatorship imposed by General Franco after the victory of the rebel side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1975). In a democratic country, but still ideologically divided, the survivors seek justice as they organize the so-called “Argentinian lawsuit” and denounce the legally sanctioned pact of oblivion that intends to hide the crimes they were subjects of.

13-year-old Sinikka vanishes on a hot summer night. Her bicycle is found in the exact place where a girl was killed 23 years ago. The dramatic present forces those involved in the original case to face their past.

A Jewish boy living in Amsterdam at the onset of World War II is taken to a concentration camp with his parents. Based on the memoir of Holocaust survivor Jona Oberski.

When Jane and Tun run over a girl in a car accident, they speed away immediately from the crime scene. However, Tun, a photographer, soon discovers strange shadows in his photos, which unsettles them.

An ambitious young journalist uncovers the horrific slaughter of 22,000 Polish officers during World War II, a secret kept hidden for far too many years.

In 1915 a man survives the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, but loses his family, speech and faith. One night he learns that his twin daughters may be alive, and goes on a quest to find them.

Will believes his wife Rosalind is innocent of their son's suspected murder, only to discover the devastating truth behind her past links her to another unsolved crime.

Hoping to put to rest years of unease concerning a past case, retired criminal investigator Benjamín begins writing a novel based on the unsolved mystery of a newlywed’s rape and murder. With the help of a former colleague, judge Irene, he attempts to make sense of the past.

A young Dutch soldier deployed to suppress post-WWII independence efforts in the Netherlands’ colony of Indonesia finds himself torn between duty and conscience when he joins an increasingly ruthless commander’s elite squad.

Through examining Fini Straubinger, an old woman who has been deaf and blind since her teens, and her work on behalf of other deaf-blind people, this film shows how the deaf-blind struggle to understand and accept a world from which they are almost wholly isolated.

Pil-ju, an Alzheimer's patient in his 80s, who lost all his family during the Japanese colonial era, and devotes his lifelong revenge before his memories disappear, and a young man in his 20s who helps him.

Two projectionists discover a disturbing film featuring the lynching of a woman. Not only are they troubled by the content of the movie, but strange events befall them following the viewing.

After being a victim of rape within their own home, Diana chooses to keep the trauma secret. Mario, her husband, also has something to hide. The silence takes the couple's account over the day turns gradually into a peculiar form of violence.

When photos of her at a party cause her to lose a scholarship, a student investigates whether something devastating happened to her that night.

A spiritual medium leads a paranormal investigative TV crew to a haunted home only to discover that the evil spirit she’s facing holds the key to her troubled past.

Germany 1945, Max, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, meets a radical group of Jewish resistance fighters, who, like him, lost all hope for their future after they were robbed of their existence and their entire families were killed by the Nazis. They dream of retaliation on an epic scale for the Jewish people. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Max starts identifying with the group's monstrous plans...

A mute man with a violent past is forced to take on the teeming underworld of a near-future Berlin as he searches for his missing girlfriend.

When two siblings stumble on a strange hole in the wall of their grandparents' house, horrifying incidents reveal sinister secrets about their family.

Nine-year-old Lisa discovers her sinister new friend is the ghost of the dead twin of Lisa's mother. Then Lisa's father also begins to suspect his wife of hiding a terrible secret, resulting in deadly consequences…

A dramatization of the Montreal Massacre of 1989 where several female engineering students were murdered by an unstable misogynist.

Villa Primic was once a luxurious home. Now in disrepair, the Primic family home is up for sale by the owner, Rose, and her two heirs, Massimiliano and Adele. The head of the family, Valerio, is vehemently opposed to this. The reunion is going to be complicated...

Two brothers are trying to find out the truth from years ago. The whole town is against them.

From 1928 to 1946, the lives of 12 young people and their school teacher in a poor Japanese village are profoundly affected by historical events and personal circumstances.

Three years after his sister's death, Yak relentlessly searches for the dark spirit that killed her in hopes of seeking revenge.

Four insomniac med school students are lured into a neuroscience experiment that spirals out of control and must find a way out before it’s too late.

In the 17th century, two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to Japan in an attempt to locate their mentor, who is rumored to have committed apostasy, and to propagate Catholicism.

A story about director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s parents who were both doctors, and his memories of growing up in a hospital environment.

Years after his mysterious disappearance, Julio Arenas, a famous Spanish actor, is back in the news thanks to a television program.

Interrogated by a customs officer, a young man recounts how his life was changed during the making of a film about the Armenian genocide.

In this documentary, Alex trusts his twin, Marcus, to tell him about his past after he loses his memory. But Marcus is hiding a dark family secret.

An embittered law student commits a brutal double murder; a family man takes the fall and is forced into a harsh prison sentence; a mother and her two children wander the countryside looking for some kind of redemption.

A 5-year-old girl embarks on a harrowing quest for survival amid the sudden rise and terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Diana, a high-class prostitute trying to escape from a serial killer, suffers a car accident that leaves her blind and kills the family of Chin, a ten-year-old boy.

Burgundy, France. Solange's 60th birthday celebrations are violently interrupted by her estranged brother, Bernard. His outburst will reawaken painful memories and reveal untold stories of the Algerian War.

While searching for a solution to his serious health condition, David, a renowned neurosurgeon, discovers a sinister secret hidden in the past.

A group of students arrives in a small town during a hiking expedition. Once there, the local priest accuses them of being communist agitators on the run from an army crack-down against student demonstrations in nearby Mexico City and rallies the townsfolk to lynch them. Based on a true story.

When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine.

Paris, 1984. A group of friends contend with the first outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.

A documentary of the decline of America. Featuring footage (most exclusive to this film) from race riots to serial killers and much, much more.

Traveling through an unnamed European country on the brink of war, sickly, intellectual Ester, her sister Anna and Anna's young son, Johan, check into a near-empty hotel. A basic inability to communicate among the three seems only to worsen during their stay. Anna provokes her sister by enjoying a dalliance with a local man, while the boy, left to himself, has a series of enigmatic encounters that heighten the growing air of isolation.

Anya and Daniel just moved to their new house in Bandung. Daniel brings home a doll from his workplace. Anya, who is a dollmaker, welcomes the doll happily to their house. They later learned that the doll belonged to a little girl named Uci, who died when she and her family were brutally murdered in a robbery. Strange things begin to happen.....

Betrayed by the Dutch colonial forces, Arana manages to escape along with his nephews Jamar and Suwo, the newborn sons of Hamza, one of the last Indonesian sultans fighting against foreign tyranny. In 1860, after wandering for years on the plains of the American Wild West, Arana and the two brothers return to Indonesia to avenge their dead loved ones and punish the evil man who caused their misfortune.

As the 15th anniversary of a fatal high school shooting approaches, former pupil Diana McFee is haunted by memories of the tragedy. After losing her best friend Maureen in the attack, Diana has been profoundly affected by the incident - her seemingly perfect life shaped by the events of that day.

After hearing a loud ‘bang’ at daybreak, a Scottish woman begins experiencing a mysterious sensory syndrome while traversing the jungles of Colombia.

A couple on holiday on a remote South Pacific island awaken one morning with a hang over and no recollection of what transpired. When playing back a video of the previous night, they see they participated in a local ritual that somehow ends with him murdering her.

Cynical British journalist Fowler falls in love with a young Vietnamese woman but is dismayed when a naïve U.S. official also begins vying for her attention. In retaliation, Fowler informs the communists that the American is selling arms to their enemy.

Jiney is an popular art and photography student, but despite winning an award, she remains unhappy with her work. After photographing the aftermath of a fatal car accident, she finds herself obsessed with death. Suffering from morbid throughts, flashbacks of an incident from her youth when she was sexually abused by some young boys start to appear.

A big-city detective investigates a series of gruesome murders along the Indonesia-Malaysia border — forcing her to confront ghosts from her past.

When ambitious young correctional officer Aiman is transferred to the country's highest-security prison, he catches the attention of the seasoned chief executioner Rahim. Aiman's desire to become the hangman's apprentice is not only professional but born of an unspeakable urge to reconnect with a past that haunts him.

A young man washes ashore, his memory gone - but his past comes back to haunt him after he is nursed back to health and his killing ability is needed when he takes on a powerful drug lord.

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invades Poland, unleashing World War II. On September 17th, the Soviet Red Army crosses the border. The Polish army, unable to fight on two fronts, is defeated. Thousands of Polish men, both military and government officials, are captured by the invaders. Their fate will only be known several years later.

With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person responsible for the death of his family.

A man searches for his childhood best friend, a Polish violin prodigy orphaned in the Holocaust, who vanished decades before on the night of his first public performance.

Against the backdrop of a military dictatorship, Eugenia is reunited with her estranged family following her father’s stroke and is forced to confront dark secret.

A blind concert violinist gets a cornea transplant allowing her to see again. However, she gets more than she bargained for when she realizes her new eye can see ghosts. She sets out to find the origins of the cornea and discover the fate of its former host.

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.

When his clan, including his wife and baby girl Néa, are massacred, Ao, a desperate Neandertal man, decides to leave the North country where he has been living for the South where he was born. His aim is to join his twin brother, from whom he was separated when he was nine. On his long and adventurous way home, he meets Aki, a Homo Sapiens woman...

Anna is living with "face-blindness" after surviving a serial killer's attack. As she lives with her condition, one in which facial features change each time she loses sight of them, the killer closes in.

Examining the violent death of the filmmaker’s brother and the judicial system that allowed his killer to go free, this documentary interrogates murderous fear and racialized perception, and re-imagines the wreckage in catastrophe’s wake, challenging us to change.

The 19 years old Thomas wakes up in a hospital after three years in a coma. He doesn't remember anything. The psychologist Anna tells him that his family has been murdered and that he is the only survivor of the massacre while his sister Laura is still missing.

When a remote village is plagued by a deadly curse, one brother must fight to save his family from a terrifying supernatural threat.

A young, lonely woman is consumed by her deepest and darkest desires after tragedy strikes her quiet country life.

26 years ago, state troops were ordered to open fire on civilians in the city of Gwangju who were demonstrating as apart of a democratic movement. Thousands of civilians were killed. Now, a shooter from the national team, a gang member, a policeman, CEO from a large company and director of a private security outfit get involved in a plan to convict the person responsible for the massacre.

An ophthalmologist's assistant with an unhealthy interest in human eyeballs goes on a killing spree to collect eyeballs for his overbearing mother's collection. Reality soon takes a bizarre turn, both for the characters and the audience.

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

Hours after the tragic death of their youngest brother in unexplained circumstances, three siblings have their lives thrown into chaos.

A mute gunslinger fights in the defense of a group of outlaws and a vengeful young widow, against a group of ruthless bounty hunters.

A German woman on a ship returning to Europe notices a face of another woman which brings recollections from the past. She tells her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war, but she has actually saved a woman's life.

Loner Mark Lewis works at a film studio during the day and, at night, takes racy photographs of women. Also he's making a documentary on fear, which involves recording the reactions of victims as he murders them. He befriends Helen, the daughter of the family living in the apartment below his, and he tells her vaguely about the movie he is making.

A former serial killer with Alzheimer's fights to protect his daughter from her mysterious boyfriend who may be a serial killer too.

At a Thai hospital, a doctor and his seven nubile nurses engage in the sale of dead bodies. Jealousy causes one of the nurses to threaten to blow the whistle on the practice, so the others murder her. Soon the spirit of the slain nurse seeks revenge. In flashbacks we see the events leading up to the murder, and realize the full range of relationships between the main characters.

The film follows two brothers over the course of a decade. While they begin as kids in search of thrills in the sprawling slums of Morocco’s Sidi Moumen, we witness their gradual, and ultimately shocking, radicalisation.

When a mute makeup/special effects artist working on a low-budget slasher film gets locked in a dilapidated Moscow movie studio late one night, she thinks she witnesses the making of a snuff film. Thus begins a night of terror.

Because he wanted to protect his little brother, Teddy, a young man without a history, is accused of the murder of his father and sent to a closed educational center, waiting for his trial for parricide. He then plunges into a brutal universe of which he does not know the rules.

The story of a family embroiled in the "White Terror," the Kuomintang government's anti-communist political repression that was wrought on the Taiwanese people from 1947-1987.

When his family is murdered, a deaf-mute named Boy escapes to the jungle and is trained by a mysterious shaman to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death.

A woman inherits a house in her ancestral village, but she's unaware that members of the community have been trying to locate and kill her to remove the curse that has plagued them for years.

An investigation of the massacre of 24 men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq allegedly shot by 4 U.S. Marines in retaliation for the death of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb. The movie follows the story of the Marines of Kilo Company, an Iraqi family, and the insurgents who plant the roadside bomb.

Julia, a woman suffering from a degenerative sight disease, finds her blind sister Sara hung in a basement. Despite all signs pointing to suicide, Julia decides to investigate what she intuitively feels is a murder case.

Violinist Sydney Wells was accidentally blinded by her sister Helen when she was five years old. She submits to a cornea transplantation, and while recovering from the operation, she realizes that she is seeing dead people.

A tight-knit team of FBI investigators, along with their District Attorney supervisor, is suddenly torn apart when they discover that one of their own teenage daughters has been brutally murdered.

With only 24 hours left to live, a private investigator follows a trail of confounding clues to uncover the disappearance of his childhood friend.

The behind-the-scenes true life story of a groundbreaking producer, Milton Fruchtman, and blacklisted TV director Leo Hurwitz who, overcoming enormous obstacles, set out to capture the testimony of one of the war's most notorious Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, who is accused of executing the 'final solution' and organising the murder of 6 million Jews. This is the extraordinary story of how the trial came to be televised and the team that made it happen.

A novelist is blinded in a car crash that killed his wife and several years later rediscovers his passion for life and writing when he embarks on an affair with the neglected wife of an indicted businessman.

A Danish officer, Michael, is sent away to the International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan for three months. His first mission there is to find a young radar technician who had been separated from his squad some days earlier. While on the search, his helicopter is shot down and he is taken as a prisoner of war, but is reported dead to the family.

Academy Award®–winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) explores the charged issue of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, following a trail from the first known protest against clerical sexual abuse in the United States and all way to the Vatican.

One year after running away from home, Nicole and Jesse are still missing. When Jesse's brother, Tom, returns home from active duty, he sets out with his friends Marilyn and Jared to locate the lost couple. Their search leads them to the stretch of old highway with a mysterious Rest Stop, where they find themselves in the same predicament as Nicole and Jesse: confronting a madman.

Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation, Tower reveals the action-packed untold stories of the witnesses, heroes and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.

On the third anniversary of a cult's failed chemical attack on Tokyo and their subsequent mass suicide, family members of those affected gather at the cult's former base on the shores of a lake to observe the anniversary of their loved ones' deaths.

A young couple is pushed to the limits of sanity as they attempt to be reunited amid the chaos of a pandemic outbreak. The streets erupt into violence and depravity, as those infected are driven to enact the most cruel and ghastly things imaginable.

Orense, Spain, 1940, just after the end of the Civil War. Every time Elena locks the door of her home, she and her children become the faithful guardians of a sacred secret: Ricardo, her husband, their father, hides in the house, trying to avoid the brutal political persecution of the victors, who hunt, as if they were wild animals, and imprison or execute, those who have lost the bloody and tragic struggle…

It is 1595. Brutal wars have just ended in an uneasy peace between Protestant Sweden and Orthodox Russia. We focus on the spiritual defeats of two conquered Finnish brothers, one a hardened near-psychopathic war hero, the other a gentle scientist in an age with no use for such men. They find themselves in the swampy interior, demarcating the new border with a unit of sadistic Russians.

M, a university dropout low on money and luck, volunteers to take care of his terminally ill grandmother, in the hope of pocketing an inheritance.

After an attack renders her blind, Ellen withdraws from the world to recover. But soon she plunges into paranoia, unable to convince anyone that her assailant has returned to terrorize her by hiding in plain sight.

Since 2014, France's restorative justice programmes have offered a safe space for supervised dialogue between offenders and victims. Grégoire, Nawelle, and Sabine, victims of heists and violent robberies, agree to join one of these discussion groups alongside offenders Nassim, Issa, and Thomas, all convicted of violent robberies. Meanwhile Chloé, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, prepares for dialogue with her own agressor after learning he has moved back into town.

Handsome 25-year-old Cesar had it all -- a successful career, expensive cars, a swank bachelor's pad, and an endless string of beautiful and willing women -- until he is thrown into a strange psychological mystery after a car accident scars his face and lands him in prison.

After losing his wife and his memory in a car accident, a single father undergoes an experimental treatment that causes him to question who he really is.

Both a journalist and a documentary filmmaker chase the story of a murder and its prime suspect.
