THE FILM
TITLE: The Zone Of Interest
RELEASE DATE: 19 May 2023
WATCH DATE: 05 Feb 2024
TYPE: live-action feature film (German)
ACCESS: movie theater
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THE PEOPLE
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glazer
PRODUCER: James Wilson, Ewa Puszczyńska, Bugs Hartley, Bartek Rainski
ACTORS: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller
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THE STORY
RUNTIME: 1h 45m
STORYLINE: a German commander oversees the Auschwitz concentration camp while living right next door with his family
GENRE/THEMES: drama, history, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, day-in-the-life
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THE CRITIQUE
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
The Zone of Interest is the inversion of every Holocaust film you’ve seen. All we see of Auschwitz are the front gates and the roofs of the buildings from over the wall that separates the camp from the Höss’ property. A sprawling garden, beautiful flowers and paths, a gazebo, a pool, and a greenhouse all lie in the shadow of ignored horrors unfolding merely feet away. As Hedwig (Rudolf’s wife) says, “The vines will grow and cover it all.” The horror of the film is what lies just out of sight the whole time.
At the beginning of the film, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) reviews plans for a newly designed furnace, foreshadowing for the rest of the film. Billowing smoke, ash in the river, and the flicker of flames haunt the background from then on. That's all we get. The rest is the life of the Höss family: Hewig running the house; their children playing in the pool.
Much of this film was extremely avant-garde - a red screen about halfway through dominates over a minute of runtime. Other sequences feature night-vision footage of an entirely different character - a Polish girl, placing apples at the base of shovels (supposedly where the enslaved Jews are being put to work). These scenes provide a much-needed break from the daily life of the main characters. It piques the viewer’s interest, but they end up being more confusing as they lack a connection to the main storyline, and present too many unanswered questions.
The cinematography is designed to make you feel utterly uncomfortable. Shots are often framed to place the subject of the scene dead center on the screen. The sound design carries the whole film. For all intense purposes, this is the main point of the film. To see people living daily life while hearing the horrors of the Holocaust in the background.
It fell flat in the second half, the shock and horror had leveled out and just left me shaking my head and covering my mouth at the continued elements from the first half. I kept waiting for the development of the night-vision sequences into the storyline/plot - there had been two in the first two-thirds of the film - but clarity never came. Those scenes left me with lots of unanswered questions by the end of the film. There was a ton of potential in those scenes to provide a small contrast to the starkness of the Höss’ life.
3.5 stars for being good and great filmmaking, but only 3.5 stars for its unanswered questions and lack of energy in the second half.
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THE RECEPTION
NOMINATIONS
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THE IMPRESSION
IN A SINGLE WORD: appalling (as it should be)
MOST STRIKING ELEMENT: mundanity in the face of horror
REWATCH: no
RATING: 3.5 // 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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