By any chance, is it a particularly loaded time to discuss a movie about the tepid indifference with which genocidal actions can be carried out? Are there, perhaps, parallels to be drawn with current events involving petty, selfish everyday monsters living privileged lives next to barbed wire fences encircling human beings rounded up and stripped of their humanity? For a movie that is intentionally, upsettingly simplistic, writer/director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest gets really complicated really fast.
Unfairly or not, the first question often asked about any Holocaust movie is “Do we need another one of those?” Well, 20% of young Americans think it was a myth. So…yes? Yes we do. Let’s just mark that one off as “answered in full.” The second question, which is now the first question, is whether or not the film traffics in exploitation for the sake of awards and acclaim. Trading Jewish suffering for Oscar gold was joked about on a TV show nearly 20 years ago, and The Zone of Interest was nominated for five Academy Awards.
However…
This is another question we can probably put to bed here. Whatever it is, and nobody here is suggesting it’s “good” (yet), Glazer’s latest is not Oscar bait. It is a challenging, uniquely disquieting film that finds a way to upset audiences in the lengths it goes to in avoiding grotesque imagery. No victims are shown on screen. Only the things they left behind. Their clothes. Their jewelry. Their teeth.
That last one sticks with you.
The whole film does, despite virtually nothing happening. Rudolf (Christian Friedel), oversees the Auschwitz concentration camp. He lives next door. Like, his backyard shares a wall with it. His wife, Sandra (Hedwig), and kids laugh, play, garden, and chat while smoke from crematoriums billows above them, their conversations only slightly louder than the intermittent gunfire. Their lives are mundane and stupid. They are the very worst kind of evil: boring, and ordinary.
Most movies that focus on despicable, irredeemable vermin take time to consider their side of things. It’s why those films are repellant to me. Nobody offers so much as a fleeting defense here. No backstories are presented. No context needed. This is a shallow couple concerned about conspicuous consumption and comfort, picking ashes of dead Jews from their hair. It is wildly enraging in its dry, dull depiction.
The point is beyond clear: These are the faces of the mundanely wicked. The Holocaust wasn’t even mostly attributable to extreme and obvious madmen. It was overwhelmingly perpetrated by people like these. To spend several hours with them in a movie theater is among the most profoundly disturbing experiences. But to what end?
That is to say, although The Zone of Influence brilliantly, strategically elicits its intended emotional response, is it valuable? Do we learn more about ourselves, our neighbors, our leaders, our future, our past by enduring this film? Because it isn’t enjoyed. It can’t be.
The last sequence is haunting and one that I won’t ever forget. But it will never be seen by the humans who most need its message. In the unlikely event it is, they won’t “get it.” So what is gained by those of us already actively appalled at genocides, past and currently ongoing, hanging out with these devils for a few hours?
Maybe the point is that those of us who feel like we “already get it” need to be poked and prodded, need to be roused to the routine monstrosities. Maybe this isn’t “preaching to the converted” but punishing the too-inactive, the too-comfortable, the too-confidently noble.
Again, whatever it is, it is not exploitative Oscar bait. It is unquestionably, inarguably actual art.
Grade = A
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Clarisse Loughrey at the Independent (UK) says “An extended title sequence provides a kind of sensory deprivation. A darkened screen gives way to the hellish sirens of Mica Levi’s score, before we awaken, powerless to disrupt Hoss’s hermetic reality. At the very end, Glazer chooses to flash forward, his intentions made concrete – the evils of today will leave their own scars on history.”
Victoria Luxford at City AM says “The absence of violence in The Zone of Interest isn’t intended to soften, or humanise those responsible. On the contrary, by making you imagine what is happening just beyond the wall, the reality is all the more sobering. The most important film in Glazer’s already-impressive career, it’s a devastating experience.”
Sarah G. Vincent at InBetween Drafts says “The Zone of Interest editorializes with its use of contrasting abstract moments that interrupt the otherwise conventional still shots of the home, its grounds, and the family’s leisure time in the country and on the nearby river.”