The Zone of Interest (2023)
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
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What critics say influenced The Zone of Interest
It's this emphasis on keeping the Holocaust unsaid and unseen yet always heard is what makes The Zone of Interest an undeniably powerful yet unique cinematic experience that lines it in the tradition of films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) – a coughing fit evokes Anwar Congo from the latter.
This is the same line of reasoning that leads to the (extremely stylistically different) 1985 documentary Shoah, for one, and I will say that I don't know that I agree.
Claude Lanzmann, in his monumental Shoah, gave us the bureaucratic answer: defining at length the logistics of how it happened. British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer now offers up a physiological response: the mental compartmentalization needed to completely sidestep and ignore a soul-shattering nightmare happening in your vicinity.
It's this emphasis on keeping the Holocaust unsaid and unseen yet always heard is what makes The Zone of Interest an undeniably powerful yet unique cinematic experience that lines it in the tradition of films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) – a coughing fit evokes Anwar Congo from the latter.
Later, after a coughing fit that evokes memories of Anwar Congo in “The Act of Killing,” Glazer suddenly introduces an even more dramatic break from the film's established style — one that returns us to the dialectic between depicting an atrocity and tracing the chalk outline of one.
Glazer’s approach in these grander moments is especially powerful near the end of the film, as Rudolf has what seems to be a moment of self-awareness akin to the ending of Joshua Oppenheimer’s incredible documentary The Look of Silence, spliced together with a vision of…
In its icy precision, Glazer's movie reminded me of the Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose films, like Caché and The White Ribbon, are often about the violence simmering beneath well-maintained domestic surfaces.
Michael Haneke famously had the most violent acts in Funny Games occur off camera, denying audience members any visceral thrill or catharsis they might be seeking.
In its icy precision, Glazer's movie reminded me of the Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose films, like Caché and The White Ribbon, are often about the violence simmering beneath well-maintained domestic surfaces.
Rudolf Höss (The White Ribbon’s Christian Friedel) is the commandant of Auschwitz, and he and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) have come from very little, and now have the home of their dreams, complete with several kids, and a handful of Jewish women that work within their house.
Glazer boldly avoids these possible exploitive dishonesties by only focusing on the ice-cold characters at the center of the black hole in place of the film’s heart: that being Commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel, best known for his remarkable work in Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon) and his wife, Hedwig (the captivating Sandra Hüller).
Documentaries like “Shoah” and Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” suggest that you don’t, while historical epics like “Schindler’s List” insist that you must. If the latter argues that seeing is believing, the former maintains that seeing wouldn’t help — that some things are too unfathomable for the human eye to comprehend from a distance, and can only hope to be understood by their absence.
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…the lush rural landscapes of “The Railway Children” (1970). The script’s power exists through its fly-on-the-wall effect.
When speaking of Tobe Hooper‘s horrifying classic of American nihilism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, director John Carpenter stated that, while the film did indeed terrify him, it “pacified [his] soul”. And while Jonathan Glazer‘s fourth feature film is much more comparable to the late works of Kubrick and Roy Andersson than any horror film (though I’m of the opinion that his latest is fairly incomparable to any motion picture ever made), I found The Zone of Interest to have a similar effect on me that Chain Saw seemingly had on Mr. Carpenter.
What could Jonathan Glazer, the genius director of Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin, have found in it to film? Almost nothing is the answer, except the original inspiration to make a movie not about the victims of Auschwitz but about the perpetrators, notably its actual commandant, Rudolf Höss, and his family.
The master storyteller behind Under the Skin and Sexy Beast gives us a film that might take inspiration from Amis’ novel, but that’s something else entirely.
The Zone of Interest is easily Glazer’s best film to date since his impressive debut in Sexy Beast and certainly a cut above his last two polarising and pretentious Birth (2004) and Under the Skin (2013).
Like many of his contemporaries, he spent the ‘90s making music videos and advertisements (that Guinness one still slaps) before a shift to features that has so far given us Sexy Beast (2001), Birth (2004), and Under The Skin (2013).
Before we see a single frame of The Zone of Interest, from Sexy Beast and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer, we can feel the all-encompassing nature of evil.
Since his debut film Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer has stood on the balance between the mainstream and art house experimentation.
The Zone of Interest is easily Glazer’s best film to date since his impressive debut in Sexy Beast and certainly a cut above his last two polarising and pretentious Birth (2004) and Under the Skin (2013).
What could Jonathan Glazer, the genius director of Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin, have found in it to film?
Like many of his contemporaries, he spent the ‘90s making music videos and advertisements (that Guinness one still slaps) before a shift to features that has so far given us Sexy Beast (2001), Birth (2004), and Under The Skin (2013).
The first film by Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer in more than a decade, the Holocaust-set, Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning feature peers on as the unthinkable happens literally just over the fence, but a family goes about its ordinary life.
Clearly not an enjoyable film, devoid of the vestiges of humanity explored in his previous films, like Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004) and his 2013 masterpiece Under the Skin, but similarly dealing with base explorations of characters attempting to fill a significant void—only this time, Glazer turns his eye to those who have willfully stepped into one they can never escape.
The extremity of that formal choice can't help but remind me of Glazer's “Under the Skin” (2013), a bewitchingly creepy sci-fi thriller that was, in some ways, as radical a study in anti-empathy as this one.
The Zone of Interest is easily Glazer’s best film to date since his impressive debut in Sexy Beast and certainly a cut above his last two polarising and pretentious Birth (2004) and Under the Skin (2013).
But that was followed by the maddeningly opaque “Birth” (2004) and then “Under the Skin” (2013), a sci-fi parable starring Scarlett Johansson as an otherworldly predator that became a critical darling, though it was one I couldn't sign on for.
As was the case with his previous film Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has made something wholly unique to him, in this case never sacrificing the deeply meaningful material that he is adapting.
“The Zone of Interest” is Jonathan Glazer's first film since “Under the Skin” (2014).
Building upon the hidden camera tricks utilised in Under the Skin to lure real men into the van driven by Scarlett Johansson's otherworldly figure, Glazer and Żal shot the film with ten fix…
The Zone of Interest acts as a complimentary piece to the films that are about the suffering of the genocide, such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, painting the inhumanity of those whom imprisoned, tortured, and killed, the millions of Jews.
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Ostensibly a Holocaust film, it is unlike any other film created on the subject, and that includes 2015's first-person perspective Son of Saul about a man fighting to survive life in the camps.
This marks a bold choice that sets the film apart from other acclaimed Oscar-winning Holocaust films like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, and László Nemes's Son of Saul.
Compared to something like Son of Saul (2015) or The Painted Bird (2019), which are grueling, violent spectacles, Glazer’s sense of dread is paired into meager focal points who, unbeknownst to themselves, have become emotional zombies.
…not unlike The Tree of Life back in 2011, I suspect that part of the cost the film is going to pay for its visibility is that it's going to be watched by a lot of people who don't want it and aren't interested in it.