Drama
Rating: 4. Rating scale: 0 to 5.
”The zone of interest”
Regi: Jonathan Glazer.
Manus: Jonathan Glazer.
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, and more.
Length: 1 hr 45 min (11 years). Language: English. Bio premiere.
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Few subjects are as charged and difficult to describe as the Holocaust. Through testimonials? Stock photos? Dramatized stagings? Claude Lanzmann (“Shoah”) and Alain Resnais (“Night and Fog”) are two of the directors who tried and whose approach has been both praised and problematized. Jonathan Glazer’s four-time Cannes award-winning and five-time Oscar nominee “The zone of interest,” loosely based on Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, takes boldly modern approaches to provide new perspectives on the past.
The form of expression can be categorized as realistic. Static camera, long shots, depth focus. Coolly observing? No, rather eerily clarifying. The radicality of the visual language – not to mention the sound image – is gasp-hugging.
Right from the start make it clear Jonathan Glazer his artistic case by letting the title fade to black screen. In the mind-numbing darkness we remain for a while, with Mica Levi’s nasty music as our only company. Attention is drawn to what cannot be seen.
Then a dazzling family outing by the water, followed by various pleasures in a dream house with a paradisiacal garden. The infamous SS officer and commandant Rudolf Höss lives here with his family. Nearest neighbor? Rudolf’s workplace: the Auschwitz extermination camp, where around 1.1 million Jews were killed.
In horror, fear is often created of the evil that lurks in the dark. Here, Höss is brought out into the sunlight. And instead of a monster, we meet an animal lover, husband, father of several children and respected colleague. Who, in his spare time, canoes with the children and, wearing an SS tunic, stands and fishes (until a floating jaw makes him lose his appetite).
The banality of evil? Rather than humanizing and psychologizing, the everyday scenes tease out the discomfort. It is frightening to see Rudolf and his smiling wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller from “Free Fall”) manage to find a carefree idyll, side by side with other people’s worst nightmares. Not until there is talk of displacement does the dream bubble burst.
Flowers and greenery in all their glory, but Glazer and his photographer Lukasz Zal refuse to beautify the environment. The lighting is artless and the compositions anything but flattering. Suddenly you can see a lampshade encroaching on the upper edge of the image – a typical detail that would otherwise have been neat to remove. Many scenes were shot with ten cameras at the same time, which together create a hard-edged continuity. Although the time is the 1940s, the surveillance aesthetic gives a sense of live broadcast. “‘Big Brother’ in the Nazi house,” Glazer calls it in an interview with the film site Screen Daily.
André Bazin, the early pillar saint of film realism, believed that film opens a window to the world. In the family home, it becomes apparent how different the world looks, depending on which window you look out of. Like when Hedwig’s mother is visiting. At first so happy and proud of her daughter’s status, this “Queen of Auschwitz”, but then one night she is kept awake by the fire and ashes of the camp.
Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss, “Queen of Auschwitz” in “The zone of interest”. Photo: SF Studios
The selective vision is a clear theme in the film. A visual influence must have been Rudolf Höss’s family album, happy and posing with the camera angled away from the camp. What is missing in photos but added in film is of course the sound (the design here is incomparable). The screams, the shots, the machines. Haunting reminders that the images do not convey the whole truth.
However, they can provide unexpected poetic perspectives. Thermal camera – a military variant of the FLIR brand, whose images are scaled up and clarified with AI technology – is used in a few night sequences where a girl, based on a real Polish, non-Jewish local, sneaks around and leaves fruit for the prisoners who work there day time.
She is the closest you can get to a good light in the blood-freezing darkness. When it comes to holocaust films, I think of the girl with the red coat from the otherwise black and white “Schindler’s list” (1993), but the effect here is considerably more abstract and less photogenic. Incidentally, that was one of the reasons why Jean-Luc Godard disliked Steven Spielberg’s stylized drama: he thought it glossed over reality. “It’s Max Factor”, as he put it in an interview.
Like all Holocaust dramas “The zone of interest” arouses many thoughts, questions and feelings – but it is hardly about Max Factor. Sometimes the movie is as fantastically ugly as it is ugly fantastic. It sabotages the habit view and drills deep holes in the soul.
I think more time and more viewings are needed to make a fair judgment, a lot because “The zone of interest” in its processing of the past is so direct and harsh. On the verge of dominant. That’s often the case with future classics, isn’t it? They refuse to let go.
Sow. Films about the Holocaust: “Life is wonderful” (1997). “Phoenix” (2014), “Son of Saul” (2015).
Sandra Hüller: “It takes a lot of self-control to dare to wait for the truth”
Read other film and television reviews in DN and more texts by Sebastian Lindvall.
