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View ProfilesPublished February 7, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
The first teaser I saw for Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest was on TikTok, of all places. It was presented in landscape format, usually a recipe for failure in a vertical video medium. Unlike most everything else on the platform, it had no quick cuts or obvious hook. But I couldn't scroll away from the long shot of a sunny garden with an ominous soundscape rising very, very subtly in the background.
Since then, The Zone of Interest has received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best International Feature Film. See it at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in Burlington or Essex Cinemas.
Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) lives with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children in a lovely home. He is the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which is visible on the other side of the wall from the backyard garden that is Hedwig's pride and joy.
As children frolic in the yard, screams, gunshots and chugging trains can be heard in the background, along with a pervasive industrial rumble. At night, bedroom windows glow red from the nearby crematorium — a sight that makes Hedwig's mother (Imogen Kogge) cut short her visit. Hedwig herself is unbothered, being more concerned that her husband's promotion will force the family to vacate the home she has groomed to perfection. She has achieved her lifestyle goals and has no regrets.
In recent years, I've often seen the argument that depicting Nazis on film runs the risk of "humanizing" them. But what if their humanity does nothing to make their story less horrifying or cautionary — just the opposite?
Granted, it takes formidable technical skill and research to do what Glazer has done in The Zone of Interest, which is to present the Hösses as believable people without once tempting us to sympathize with them. The director took an anthropological approach that he has compared, in an interview with the Guardian, to the reality show "Big Brother." Shooting in a house adjacent to the real Auschwitz site, he hid the cameras and allowed the actors to improvise, keeping them at a clinical distance.
The resulting film encompasses both naturalism and extreme stylization. It opens with two minutes of a black screen and Mica Levi's haunting score, framing the narrative like a theatrical overture. After that, most of The Zone of Interest unfolds in lengthy, stationary wide shots like the one that mesmerized me in that teaser. Though the images have a surface beauty, the on-screen action is banal and rarely compelling.
We quickly understand why: What matters is what we don't see. Except for a few shots of Rudolf in his office, the camp interior and the prisoners are never shown. The horror remains off-screen, embedded in Johnnie Burn's meticulous sound design. (Burn and Levi also worked on Glazer's previous film Under the Skin.) We seem to be watching a family sip tea and read bedtime stories on the verge of hell. And the dissonance of the foreground idyll and the background carnage works strangely on our senses.
These days, cinema often aims to overwhelm us with sensations. But film also has the less heralded power to train us to be more alert, on an almost subliminal level, to anything amiss in our environment. The trick is a strategic alternation of stimuli and their absence. Just as Paranormal Activity conditions viewers to hear the slightest footfall in a dark room, The Zone of Interest sensitizes us to all the ambient noises we would normally tune out. It leaves us exquisitely conscious of rumbling traffic and distant sirens — and yes, there is a point to that honing of our awareness.
This is a movie about the Hösses and their garden and their chillingly blithe indifference to human suffering. It's about the monstrous yet familiar cruelty of Hedwig's mother, who relishes the thought of a wealthy woman whose home she used to clean ending up in Auschwitz. (Her breezy schadenfreude would fit right in on social media.) But The Zone of Interest is also a movie about us, because we share these people's amazing human capacity not to see and hear whatever they choose to place in the background. Their compartmentalization is willful and irredeemable. Is ours?
"For me," Glazer told the Guardian, "this is not a film about the past. It's trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators."
What are we placing in the background, exactly, that we should be paying more attention to? What are we scrolling past? The film leaves that for us to consider.
Shoah (1985; AMC+, IFC Films Unlimited, rentable): Claude Lanzmann's monumental nine-and-a-half-hour documentary consists of interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust, as well as bystanders. Unlike Night and Fog (1955; Kanopy, Max, rentable), it includes no archival footage from inside the camps, but the testimonies are horrifying enough.
The Act of Killing (2012; Freevee, Kanopy, Peacock, PLEX, Pluto TV, rentable): Like The Zone of Interest, Joshua Oppenheimer's acclaimed doc focuses on the architects of a mass killing — in this case, people who are still in power and unrepentant. It's a skin-crawling dissection that in no way excuses them.
Under the Skin (2013; Kanopy, Max, rentable): Glazer's previous film was also a study in alienation. Based on Michel Faber's novel of the same name, it's more elliptical than its source but still deeply disturbing.
Tags: Movie+TV Reviews, The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, Holocaust, Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Imogen Kogge, Staff Picks
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