B+Directed by Jonathan Glazer Starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Huller Review by Jon Kissel |  |
In Jonathan Glaser’s The Zone of Interest, a father and son, depicted as earnest and industrious factory owners who take pride in their work, make a big sale to a major prospective client. The actors portraying them do an excellent job of feeling excited but downplaying it, as though the characters are too decent to be good at hiding their emotions well. This scene could be the climax of an underdog story, where the elderly father’s dream of building something that will guarantee his legacy and the success of his descendants is finally achieved. Instead, it’s one horrifying entry of many, as the company is selling incinerators to Nazi death camps, each efficiently designed to function around the clock. Glazer’s film focuses on the client, Commandant Rudolf Hess (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children who live in a homestead directly abutting the walls of Auschwitz. Like the factory owners, they’re carrying out their own stories while hundreds of thousands are being snuffed out a few hundred meters away. Glazer uses all his considerable cinematic talents to observe and contextualize this family, never letting them forget how it is they’ve come to live the good life and watching as they shrug.
Certain topics in movies only need to hit once, and then all future revisitations of that topic or theme become repetitive. The mental gymnastics, or lack thereof, of Nazis is one of those topics. There was a period in 2018 and 2019 where I drowned myself in books about the Eastern Front and the Holocaust and Soviet gulags, including works from historian Timothy Snyder, who Glazer consulted for The Zone of Interest. After all that dark reading, nothing is going to surprise about the average Nazi soldier who has to do the dirty work of extermination. For some viewers, The Zone of Interest is going to set off those intellectual alarms as they begin to understand that camp guards or officers at Auschwitz would’ve returned to their families at night and been loving spouses or parents. This understanding is incredibly valuable because of how it demonstrates in the clearest possible terms the lines that people draw around their lives. Within the circle of the family is love and care and concern. Maybe the circle extends to the community or the nation, but if the circle exists, there is an outer perimeter, and the test is how the people beyond it are viewed and treated. For myself, this is old hat, including the Hess’ understanding of themselves as settler colonials who, once this work is completed, will resettle the east as ideal German citizens. Through no fault of its own, The Zone of Interest fails to offer any epiphanies about history or human nature. I’m just a masochist who loves to punish himself with nonfiction darkness.
What it does offer is an engrossing visual and aural experience. After their collaboration in Under the Skin, Glazer reteams with composer Mica Levi for a sparse, guttural score that makes the banal domesticity or administrative work into something otherworldly. I was pulled back to Mad God, Phil Tippett’s stop-motion journey into steampunk hell. That film was populated by desperate figures moving about in the shadow of giant biomechanical monsters whose vomit powered other monsters. Levi’s score, all bass growls and hums, is the sound of one of those monsters coming to life, like every time one of the Hess’s signed a document or scrubbed a window, they were giving some infernal being the power to take a step forward. When the score isn’t active, there’s a soundscape of Auschwitz going about its business. Pool parties are punctuated by gunshots, gardening is backed by staccato yells from guards. Special mention must be given to sound designer Johnnie Burn, who went as far as considering the distance from the homestead that certain functions in the camp took place and then incorporating that distance into what the family would’ve heard. Accompanying the sound of the film is the way that there’s always smoke in the distance, or the countless barracks of the camp that are just in the corner of the frame. Combined with the way that Glazer filmed his actors, with hidden cameras in the home as they went through a loose script, The Zone of Interest becomes immersive, voyeuristic, and justifies its ugly existence. B+
What it does offer is an engrossing visual and aural experience. After their collaboration in Under the Skin, Glazer reteams with composer Mica Levi for a sparse, guttural score that makes the banal domesticity or administrative work into something otherworldly. I was pulled back to Mad God, Phil Tippett’s stop-motion journey into steampunk hell. That film was populated by desperate figures moving about in the shadow of giant biomechanical monsters whose vomit powered other monsters. Levi’s score, all bass growls and hums, is the sound of one of those monsters coming to life, like every time one of the Hess’s signed a document or scrubbed a window, they were giving some infernal being the power to take a step forward. When the score isn’t active, there’s a soundscape of Auschwitz going about its business. Pool parties are punctuated by gunshots, gardening is backed by staccato yells from guards. Special mention must be given to sound designer Johnnie Burn, who went as far as considering the distance from the homestead that certain functions in the camp took place and then incorporating that distance into what the family would’ve heard. Accompanying the sound of the film is the way that there’s always smoke in the distance, or the countless barracks of the camp that are just in the corner of the frame. Combined with the way that Glazer filmed his actors, with hidden cameras in the home as they went through a loose script, The Zone of Interest becomes immersive, voyeuristic, and justifies its ugly existence. B+
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