Angkar review – Khmer Rogue doc traces a man and his memories

In the late 1970s, Khonsaly Hay fled Cambodia for France to escape the tyranny of the Khmer Rogue. In Angkar, he returns to his village – where many of the regime's former torturers and executioners still live – in order to make sense of why he survived when so many others, including his family, perished.

In a similar vein to Joshua Oppenheimer's astounding documentary about the Indonesian genocide, The Look of Silence, which saw a man, under the guise of an eye exam, confronting the men who killed his brother, Khonsaly too meets his former opressors. But he's not here for revenge, nor to expose anyone or embarrass them on camera. He doesn't bear any grudges. He just wants closure. And the reunions are eerily calm.

This is far looser, more dream-like, and less effective than Oppenheimer's film, an investigation into both individual and collective memory that is undoubtably powerful but also feels a bit shapeless, cobbled together, and – at just 71 minutes – perhaps even unfinished.

As Khonsaly walks the same dusty roads he left forty years ago, he struggles with his own recollections about the atrocities and killings that occurred. Sometimes his memories – those he has been forced to build a life upon – seem warped or at odds with the accounts of others. But it's this internal blurring of the past that seems to have affected everyone in the region, maybe as a means of personal survival.

As much as this is a film about Khonsaly, it is equally a film about his daughter, Neary Adeline Hay, who served as its director and who was born out of a marriage forced by the regime. “I saw you haunted by the ghosts of your past,” she laments in voice-over, speaking French – evidence of her own cultural displacement. “I sense you felt guilty for not being dead.” Was it her idea to send her father here in order to make peace for both their sakes?

Angkar initially seems to locate a degree of empathy for some of the perpetrators. “I was only a spy for a year,” one man tells Khonsaly, whose own quiet expression shows an obvious attempt to try and understand the betrayal. It's here that the film seems to be asking: Who can really say what they would have done under the same circumstances? But then, during its coda, Hay plasters the names and former occupations of those we've encountered across the screen in large red letters – “Executioner,” “Throat Cutter” – and we sense her need to hold these men accountable.

There is something wisp-like about Angkar, which in itself comes to feel like an indistinct memory, though any film chronicling an atrocity that seems to grow more ambiguous with each passing year is arguably made essential by the nature of its existence. Most importantly, Ankgar does find its purpose as a cathartic exercise for those involved, even if it's never quite as satisfying for the viewer.

Angkar is now showing on True Story.