Based on the biography of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born terrorist who kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, Omerta explores in depth an individual’s shift from religious belief to insanity. The film begins at the point where Omar decides to step forward and go to the front line to protect his faith from discrimination and the profiling of Muslims. He is introduced as a cautious person who doesn’t weigh his religious faith against other’s lives easily. Having described in depth for the first time the anxiety he felt when kidnapping a tourist in India in 1994, his subsequent gradual radicalization towards violence is revealed through real footage. Omerta neither attempts to make the life of a terrorist fathomable, nor to persuade viewers of how truly frightening terrorists can be. Instead, the film exposes the cruelty of violence that becomes routine, through simply but clearly visualizing the path of his highs and lows to a point of total distortion in his life–that is to say, the moment when the violence becomes grotesquely serene. (PARK Jin-hee)