At the heart of every instance of genocide lie a series of possibly unanswerable questions: How could it have happened? How could ostensibly average people allow themselves to be used as vehicles for unspeakable evil? How can a society's moral compass become so misguided that minor, often imaginary transgressions are considered punishable by torture and death? Those questions permeate S21, a harrowing, unblinking look at the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal regime that by some accounts killed off more than a quarter of Cambodia's population between 1975 and 1979.
Centering on a ghoulishly empty former "security bureau" where 17,000 Cambodians were interrogated, tortured, forced to write phony "confessions," and ultimately killed, Rithy Panh's wrenching film brings together one of the center's only survivors—a painter who survived largely due to his gift for crafting flattering portraits of evil men—with guards who view themselves as victims even while confessing their crimes against humanity. The guards dispassionately and predictably insist that they were just following orders, that indoctrination and fear for their own survival forced them to devolve into inhuman killing machines, but their overly enthusiastic re-creations of past abuse contradict their already sketchy rationalizations.
It's clear that institutional insanity and the regime's perversion of Marxism have indelibly marked the guards as vividly as the righteously angry former prisoner, but S21 denies audiences any sense of catharsis or closure. Some crimes are just too horrifying to be forgiven or rationalized, and the film allows the almost unbearable horror of the Khmer Rouge to linger like an open wound in the blazing sun, playing powerful witness to an almost inconceivable tragedy. Panh's disturbing documentary illustrates a point that the ubiquity of war renders perpetually timely: Those who deny their enemies' humanity and dignity are doomed to lose their own.