‘The Zone Of Interest’ Review: Jonathan Glazer’s Masterpiece Is Unlike Anything You’ve Seen [TIFF]
The Zone of Interest. Courtesy of A24.
Rudolf and Hedwig live by the river. They have five kids and a dog. One of the boys looks like a Boy Scout. He wears a swastika. Their house has a fence. It’s not white picket. It’s a concrete wall, with barbed wire on top. We never cross it. Rudolf goes to work past the fence. He sees the bullets. And the gas. And the bodies. He’s in charge of the camp.
This is the general story of The Zone of Interest, the first film in a decade from Under the Skin filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, which examines how we define evil and if we can recognize it if it’s shown under a light that normalizes some of the most terrible, inhumane events of our history. Most of the movies that come to mind when someone says, “Think of a Holocaust film” (e.g., Schindler’s List) depict the atrocities committed by the Nazi party explicitly. Instead, Glazer trusts us as competent viewers to know enough about this piece of our history that he doesn’t have to put everything that’s being said in the forefront of a frame, adding to the subtle, crushing impact of these moments. We feel it when a Nazi blows ash out of his nose, when we see the smoke of the train carrying Jews to the killing center, when Rudolf (Christian Friedel) tells one of his maids that he’ll spread her ashes over a field, and when he repeatedly says, “Heil Hitler. Et cetera.” The way that Glazer subverts structural and thematic expectations by making Rudolf — who does and says terrible things throughout the entire movie — the protagonist in a typical sense, works to create this lens of normalcy, one that has to be shattered by our own intelligence and knowledge about this tragic part of our history.
Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest. Courtesy of A24.
To be completely fair, this point is made within the first few minutes — when we initially see the wall, camp, and smoke — and doesn’t really evolve until the very end, but that doesn’t take away from how absolutely chilling it is. If you’ve seen Under the Skin, you know how confident Jonathan Glazer is with visually-driven, dialogue-less scenes and just how good he is at them. While not every moment is as visually abstract as the imagery of men descending into pitch black or stark white backgrounds while approaching Scarlett Johansson, the film’s sterilized environment makes for an exciting divide from the uniformity of the day-set scenes to the polarizing black-and-white infrared imagery of the few scenes set at night. Lukasz Zal’s cinematography benefits from the incredible production design (done by Chris Oddy), which makes you question if the crew went back to the ‘40s to shoot on location.
To give more of a glimpse into the film’s story than it only being about awful people doing awful things, we primarily focus on Rudolf Hoss, Auschwitz Commandant, and his family and the serene life that they’ve built for themselves. We spend the majority of our time in their home on the border of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Soldiers walk directly out of the camp to wish Rudolf a happy birthday. We hear gunshots as Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tries on a new fur coat (that was “liberated” from a Jewish woman). All of this is to highlight the way that The Zone of Interest asks its viewers if and how we know something is evil by displaying it in a softer light, with the smallest aspects of each scene – the sound, score, and cinematography — being imperative to the success of the film’s impact.
The film is bookended by the haunting notes of Mica Levi’s score, reminiscent of the overtures presented before films like 2001: A Space Odyssey while setting a distinctly different tone than the music presented in the films you recognize. Between this, the singular visual language, and the fly-on-a-wall nature of the observational manner in which we’re placed into this story, it’s clear that the standout quality of the film is Glazer’s directorial vision. It’s impressive how effectively we feel the atrocities of the Holocaust without ever directly seeing them in a capacity more than in the background or corner of a frame. It seamlessly integrates its ideas into a breathtaking form without losing any of its story.
Christian Friedel in The Zone of Interest. Courtesy of A24.
It’s not accurate to say that The Zone of Interest completely shies away from depicting parts of the Holocaust — characters discuss making the gas chambers more efficient, we see Jews walked through grass fields towards the camp as Rudolf and his son ride horses in their “backyard” — but it shows them in a manner that adds to the environmentally impactful depiction of this caste system created by the Nazis, carried out by the sheepish men who were willing to do nothing but get in line for the slightest chance of grasping the power that they held in that era.
Glazer carefully composes the physical representation of the banality of evil here with a depiction that leads to more of a discussion rather than factual statements of the film’s meaning — are all these men behaving innately inhumanely, or are they simply doing what they must do to get by? (Also, see Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, which unpacks similar themes from a different perspective.)
When reflecting on Glazer’s efforts as a writer and director, one can’t ignore the fact that the film is adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 book of the same name — if you haven’t already read it, though, hold off until after seeing the film to witness its full impact. The one place where The Zone of Interest may turn off some viewers (those who haven’t committed to the film regardless of which direction it goes in) is in the way the story evolves in the third act. The story shifts its focus here with a decision that will leave some silent and others believing that the runtime needs to be shortened.
The sad reality that The Zone of Interest forces us to face is the fact that most evil is carried out by people who never distinctly made up their minds as to whether they’re good or evil and are simply doing what they’re told. Whether or not the film is for you, The Zone of Interest is undoubtedly a masterpiece. It’s the type of film you’ll never want to watch again but will need to so you can unpack and understand everything it says. In doing this, though, Glazer cements the idea that he’s made two films here. The first is the one that we’re watching on the screen, and the second is the film that exists solely in our minds, kept behind the concrete walls that we’ll never cross.
