Certification. 12A
Running Time. 1 hour 45 mins
Director. Jonathan Glazer
Cast. Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller.
Rating. 67%
Review.
Very loosely based on a Martin Amis novel of the same name, the starting point for Jonathan Glazer's The Zone Of Interest was a visit to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp [now the Auschwitz Museum], where he noted that the family home of Rudolf Höss – Auschwitz’s first commandant – even shared a wall with the camp.
The end result is a depiction of the Holocaust unlike anything before. One that leaves you confused about how to interpret the film and how you wish to remember it. Every image from the film evokes a sense of despondency, telling a story that is much more chilling to think about the more you digest the content.
This is a film set almost entirely within the household of Auschwitz Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), tracking him and his family as they go about their normal daily business - eating, sleeping and playing - while remaining phlegmatically indifferent to the mass death and torture happening on the other side of the garden wall. Glazer has created a deliberately dull film, concerned almost entirely with the humdrum daily life of Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller).
In an extraordinary attempt to encapsulate the chilling casualness with which evil operates, the film positions the atrocities of the camp in the background, only suggesting the plights of the prisoners through sound, dialogue and visual cues, while the foreground shows all the merriness of the Nazi life. We hear sporadic, but frequent, gunfire. The nighttime sky is filled with the reddish glow of the constantly operational crematorium. The director pulls a masterstroke by not depicting the horrors of the camp. Instead, Glazer counts on our knowledge and memory of images from elsewhere — of concentration camps and Nazi iniquities, gleaned from history books, documentaries and Holocaust films so very unlike this one — to complete the horrific picture. You can’t help but retrieve ingrained images, as your gaze inevitably drifts to that tall grey garden wall, and the rooftops and smokestacks behind it.
The Zone of Interest dispenses with the usual conventions. There is no attempt to humanise or even dehumanise individuals. There is no pretence at insight. Instead, the film offers a detached and coolly observational viewpoint. It was what it was.
Nonetheless, this is a harrowing, one-of-a kind portrayal of apathy and complicity. It is a look inside the banality of evil and the willing acceptance of it.
I deeply regret not seeing The Zone Of Interest at the cinema. I think the effect on me would have been more profound.
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