THE ZONE OF INTEREST: 4 STARS. “will resonate long after the end credits have rolled.”
You do not exit “The Zone of Interest,” the latest from director Jonathan Glazer, now playing in theatres, with the words, “I really enjoyed that,” spilling from your lips. Loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, it is a study of the banality of evil that is unsettlingly ordinary and hauntingly uncomfortable.
A largely plotless, slice-of-life of the comings and goings of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), “Zone of Interest” paints a picture of a typical family.
Set in 1943, Hedwig runs the house, raises their five kids, with the help of nannies and maids, and tends to the couple’s gardens. Rudolf works next door as the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the kids play in their large yard, swim in the pool and have friends over for birthday parties, in the background the unimaginable horrors of the camp can be heard. The cries of anguish, gun shots and barked orders fall on deaf ears in the Höss household, where life goes on as normal.
Höss’s facility at delivering death earns him promotions, which threaten to uproot his family from their beloved country home to the mean streets of Berlin. Showing the kind of concern for his family he could never muster for his victims, the Commandant arranges for his Hedwig and the kids to remain in the house while he is on the road, laying the roadmap for Operation Höss in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in 56 days.
Director Glazer never goes inside the camp. Instead, he focusses his camera, by and large, on the family. The disconnect between the imagery—smiling children in the pool, Hedwig and her mother lounging in the guest bedroom—and the sounds emanating from the camp, is devastating.
Composer Mica Levy’s score is confined to the beginning and end, with only an additional burst of music here and there. The absence of music becomes deafening, forcing the ear to focus on the brutality we can hear but not see.
It harkens back to old horror movies like Val Lewton’s “Cat People,” which understood that it’s the things you cannot see, that you must be forced to imagine, that will have the greatest impact. Glazer knows whatever we think is happening on the other side of the wall between the house and the camp, will be worse than anything he could show us. “The Zone of Interest” presents an intellectual atrocity that burrows into the brain and will not soon be forgotten.
“The Zone of Interest” is a singular film. Confident in its uneasy, experimental execution, unblinking in its representation of the facilitation of evil, it isn’t an easy watch, but will resonate long after the end credits have rolled.
