Whenever filmmaker Jonathan Glazer releases a new film, and he has only made four in the past 23 years, I sit up and take notice. Sexy Beast, Birth, and Under The Skin made lasting impressions, and his latest, The Zone Of Interest, has profoundly affected me more than any other film I’ve seen this year. Based on the 2014 novel by the same name from the late Martin Amis, it relates a Holocaust narrative strictly told from the point of view of a Nazi leader and his family who live just on the other side of the wall to Auschwitz.
That family consists of the real-life Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy Of A Fall) and their children, who live in a bucolic villa complete with a swimming pool, greenhouse and extensive garden. At the outset, we watch the Höss’ picnic and lead fairly quiet, normal lives. One could easily mistake this as a serene comedy of manners if not paying careful attention. The occasional offscreen gunshot or scream, however, belies the sun-dappled visuals. Look even closer and you’ll see the barbed wire, the guard towers, and in one indelible image, the smoke from a transport train making its way across the top of the frame as Höss stands proudly watching his brood frolic in the pool.
While we never witness the atrocities, the hellish soundscape provided by the incredible composer Mica Levi and sound designer Johnnie Burn provides plenty of nightmarish context. Forget all the CGI blockbusters, THIS is the true masterclass in the use of sound. The horror at the center of this film is that of indifference, disassociation, and the “banality of evil”. Euphemisms such as “yield” to signify the number of the slaughtered, or the title, which blandly refers to the area outside the camps, allows all of us to somehow stomach the terrors at hand. This forced perspective proves unbearably agonizing.
Cinematographer Lukasz Zal (Ida, Cold War) contributes an endless series of carefully composed images, mostly wide shots and often static. The negative spaces he creates suggest the unimaginable just out of frame. We rarely get a close-up of the characters, instead we’re kept at a distance as they flatly go about their days. A scene of Höss meeting with engineers to review a more effective way to exterminate the Jews plays just as matter-of-factly as one of Hedwig gardening. When one of the children locks another in the greenhouse, one could easily find it amusing were it not for the fact that the older one makes gas chamber hissing sounds at his sibling.
Glazer takes a distancing, experimental approach to the material, somewhat as he did with Under The Skin, but the effect proves far more chilling here. He creates a rhythm with one seemingly mundane scene after another until you begin to realize that coat Hedwig tries on once belonged to a prisoner, or that her children are playing with teeth and not toys. Occasionally he interrupts the story with night vision scenes of a defiant young girl whose impact on the proceedings crystalizes later with an off-camera remark guaranteed to sap the film of any hope.
The performances for the most part seem functional and this feels clearly by design. Careful not to make the Nazis sympathetic, the actors’ flatness serves to make the audience complicit with their remove from the terrors unfolding steps away. We have room to reflect on who we have become or perhaps have always been, especially concerning the current state of things. We TikTok as the world burns. Martin Amis had previously explored a shift in historical perspective with his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, which also seemed to conclude that regardless of the point of view, cruelty and apathy persist. Amis and Glazer seem to say that Nazis don’t hold the copyright on disinterest or evil. Left unchecked and unexamined, we’re all capable of such behavior.
Despite this, both Friedel and especially Hüller create a pair of unforgettable characters. Friedel carries himself tightly as any military officer and establishes himself as a dull bureaucrat who loves his family and yet doesn’t hesitate to wield his power in horrific ways. The scariest moment in any film this year comes when he tells his wife how he feels about The Final Solution, and his last moment gives us a brief window into the bile churning up within. Hüller, for her part, proves even scarier as she clomps around the house in her heavy heels, quietly threatening one of her Jewish workers, and seething with entitled rage. At one point she laughingly, and without irony, tells her mother she’s known as the “Queen Of Aushchwitz”.
This year no other film made me ugly cry as much as All Of Us Strangers and no other film can hold a candle to the screenwriting craft and love for its characters as much as The Holdovers. The Zone Of Interest, however, despite feeling more like an art installation than a traditional movie, is a masterpiece which will stick with me forever.
By Glenn Gaylord, Senior Film Critic
The Zone Of Interest opens on limited theatrical release on Friday, December 15th, 2023, and expands over the following weeks.
