(5 / 5)
With The Zone of Interest, his first film since 2013’s Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has created another masterpiece, a monstrously mundane meditation on the banality of evil.
Based on the novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the Höss family, Rudolph (Christian Friedel), Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children. They live in an attractive estate in annexed Poland. They are an ordinary, loving family, unexceptional except in one regard: they live next door to Auschwitz concentration camp, where Rudolph is the commandant.
The Zone of Interest is a radical depiction of the Holocaust, insofar in that its focus is entirely on the work and home life of one of the principle perpetrators – the mundanity of the Höss’ everyday lives and the administrative details of Rudolph’s work.
Keeping the atrocities offscreen sounds avoidant, but Glazer knows that his audience know the horrors behind the garden wall. The dramatic tension lies in the dissonance between the normalcy of Hedwig’s mother coming to visit and the systematic mass murder taking place just out of sight.
Rudolph is due to be transferred, threatening to end the family’s current, living situation, which Hedwig refuses to accept. She seems to think the occasional intrusion of distant gunshots, yelling, even the fumes from the camp smokestacks, are inconsequential; given the otherwise bucolic life they have made for themselves.
Rudolph’s work is rendered in mundane terms: conference rooms packed with smartly-suited men discussing business strategy; only the business under discussion is genocide. The language used – “loads” to be transported and enslaved or slaughtered – isn’t euphemistic as simply dehumanizing.
In showing us the minute details of their lives, Glazer doesn’t so much humanize his subjects as provide a dreadful counterpoint to the scale of human misery we know is taking place so nearby.
Mica Levi’s keening, rumbling score seems to issue from the depths of Hell; all the more effective in being deployed tactically, sporadically. A shot of a red rose, screen turning red, as though reality itself is bleeding, filled me a wordless dread; a fear that the next cut might reveal something harrowing.
That the only decency in the film takes place secretly at night, in scenes shot in thermal-imaging negative, a solitary white figure against a black landscape – part fairytale, part alien visitor – suggesting a world where every concept we take for granted has been inverted; where an act of courageous kindness would surely be met with death.
Its scope may be narrow, but The Zone of Interest is intensely fascinating. The Holocaust and its victims are in every chilly, unsentimental frame; despite, indeed because, of their absence. Such nightmarish normalcy makes for deeply unsettling viewing. It’s an incredible work of filmmaking and one that has lingered with me in days since.
