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.
A look at a strained marriage through the lens of a public murder trial, “Anatomy of a Fall,” the Palme D’Or winning film now playing in theatres, is more concerned with human drama than the procedural aspects of the story. The result is a complex look at the search for truth in relationships and justice in court.
Set at a remote country residence in the Swiss Alps, home to best-selling writer Sandra (Sandra Hüller), her less-successful writer husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). When Samuel is found dead outside the home, a pool of blood surrounding his head like a halo, questions arise.
Was it suicide or murder? Did he fall from an upstairs window, or was he pushed?
Sandra’s muted response to her husband’s death raises eyebrows, and soon suspicion leads to murder charges. In court her compassionate defense lawyer Vincent (Swann Arlaud), a man she once had an affair with, is pitted against a confrontational state prosecutor played by Antoine Reinartz in a trial that puts Sandra and Samuel’s complicated lives on display.
“Anatomy of a Fall” is not a “Law & Order” style procedural. As director Justine Triet moves through the story, the courtroom framework becomes a backdrop for a captivating study of human behavior.
At the film’s stone-cold heart is Hüller. In her hands Sandra is a compelling and complex person who confronts the usual courtroom trope of widowed wife as a sympathetic character. Her independence, powerful presence and chilly demeanor, broken by the occasional emotional outburst, stares down preconceived notions and subconscious prejudices about Sandra’s life and behavior.
Triet isn’t asking if Sandra is guilty or not. She is more interested in why we, as the observer, might pass judgment on the character, one way or another. Placing the onus of judgment on the viewer is a fascinating way to subvert the procedural genre.
At 2 hours and 30 minutes “Anatomy of a Fall” may test some viewer’s attention spans as it slowly layers detail upon detail, both procedurally and personally, but for patient audiences it offers up an interesting mystery and an opportunity to examine personal biases.
“Toni Erdmann,” a new German language film from director Maren Ade and nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars, is being billed as a comedy but that’s not exactly accurate. It is absurd and often quite funny, but those laughs come from a deep mine of pain and desperation.
Peter Simonischek is Winfried, an elderly music teacher and next level practical joker. When he isn’t teaching he’s wearing funny teeth and punking the mail delivery people, pretending to be a dangerous criminal just out of jail for sending bombs through the post. His daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), a corporate bigwig working for an oil company in Bucharest, did not inherit the clown gene.
The two are polar opposites, so when he shows up unannounced to spend time with her, she’s not entirely pleased. After a falling out he leaves, presumably to catch a plane back to Germany, only to reappear in her life as “life coach” Toni Erdmann. Dressed in an ill-fitting suit, plastic teeth and a fright wig he tries to endear himself to her friends and co-workers in a strange attempt to forge a relationship with a daughter he bares knows.
Despite Winfried’s off-the-wall antics “Toni Erdmann’s” main feel isn’t one of humour but of desperation. The father is desperate to understand his daughter’s life and career choices. Ines’s desperation manifests itself in quick blasts of temper and a kill-or-be-killed attitude on the job. Both behave strangely, expressing their dysfunction in very different ways, but they share a feeling that something is missing from their lives.
It’s heady stuff for a film that features funny teeth and clownish wigs but it works because of Ade’s unblinking camera and naturalistic and emotional performances from the leads.
Ade allows the camera to linger on uncomfortable, bittersweet moments that at first feel unnecessary but soon become intimate glimpses that reveal the inner thoughts of father and daughter. More than just padding and making an already long movie even longer, they are windows into the personalities of the characters. Like watching someone when they don’t know they’re being observed, they provide a raw look at Ines and Winfried.
The movie’s greatest moment, a public display of catharsis from Ines comes with the singing of a song. At a party father prods his daughter to sings while he plays a small electric piano. She lets loose, finally dropping her carefully constructed public persona and belts out a version of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” that would bring the house down at any respectable karaoke joint. It’s a show-stopper, an exuberant letting loose that showcases much more than Ines’s way with a song. It is a great purge, a letting go of her inhibitions after getting her buttons pushed and it is glorious.
Simonischek and Hüller are wonderfully cast. Simonischek‘s sad sack father has found an outlet through humour and, sometimes infuriatingly, passes along his wisdom to his daughter. He’s all heart and often stands in stark contrast to his all-business daughter.
Hüller has the wider character arc and makes us care about someone who is being consumed by her own sense of emptiness. Did I mention this is being marketed as a comedy? That archetype of a successful person who swaps any sort of meaningful human connection for success is ripe for parody and Hüller mines it for funny moments as Ines slowly wakes up and comes to life.
“Toni Erdmann” has no real payoff other than spending time with two fascinating characters. For me that was enough.
