Review: The Zone of Interest

Director:  Jonathan Glazer

Stars:  Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Stephanie Petrowitz

In Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn’s landmark 2012 documentary on Indonesian genocide The Act of Killing, the filmmakers make an audacious overture to the perpetrators of such vast and unspeakable crimes. They hand them the utensils of filmmaking to reenact their own atrocities, gifting the opportunity to play in the toolbox of cinema. These men show no guilt or shame. Indeed, they enjoy the games of dress-up and play with genre. But then something curious happens and their nominal ringleader Anwar Congo discovers – for the first time in his life, it seems – the gravity of his actions through these merry reconstructions. His guttural physical responses have been seared into the memories of anyone who saw that disarming piece of work.

One can see it sitting their grimly in the collage of ideas and influences that went into the latest film from Jonathan Glazer; his first feature in the decade since stark, predatory sci-fi masterpiece Under the Skin. If that film held its audience via disciplined repetition and uneasy quietude, it has nothing on The Zone of Interest, which takes Glazer’s fascination with an upsetting sound design to new extremes, and reconfigures the repetitious into something coolly horrifying.

The Höss family are a well-to-do ménage with a nice, clean home and beautiful gardens. They live in comfort. But they do so in the 1940s, and next door to Auschwitz. Because the patriarch is Rudolph Franz Ferdinand Höss (Christian Friedel), a commandant of the concentration camp who trots through the barrier on horseback every morning while his dutiful wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tends to the garden and their children play.

The Zone of Interest catalogues their lives on the border with a steely gaze. Not once do we set foot inside the walls of the camp, but its presence is always felt, either via the looming guard turrets or the daunting sounds that carry over the barbed wire night and day. The groaning of industrialism, the cries and the curt retorts of peppering gunfire. It is, simply put, stifling.

And yet life for Hedwig and her brood goes on. Once Glazer has separated us from the world outside via a lengthy, ominous overture (hat tip Mica Levi), we open on the blissful scene of a riverbank picnic between families. Carefree. Picturesque. Soon after, Rudolph hosts industrious fellow Nazis in the family home so that they can go over crematorium plans. The women sit around a cramped kitchenette table for drinks. The Zone of Interest feels like a pallid stare-out with Glazer, who steadfast refuses to blink (for the longest time, anyway). One might be tempted to throw about words like “banal” or “mundane” but it is never those things. Because of the scale of the operation next door. Because of what we know of it.

What we have here, then, is an essay in compartmentalisation. Hedwig loves her home, is prideful of it, and feels heartbroken at the prospect of having to leave it for the sake of her husband’s flourishing career. If their children have any understanding of what’s occurring mere metres away, they show little sign of it, and are only ever fleetingly distracted by unseen life-or-death dramas wafting into earshot. Collectively they don’t seem to hear the screams anymore, or see the dark plumes rising from the tall smokestacks. Such complacency is brought into sharp relief when Hedwig’s mother comes for a brief – yet memorable – stay.

But this tacit denial – a lie agreed upon – isn’t as rigorous as first appears, and there are ways in which The Zone of Interest picks at its central couple through fierce observation. Rudolph’s all-white suits fit perfectly with the pared-back colour palette that Glazer has chosen here (accentuated across the film’s striking promotional art). He sees himself above all, figurative and literally – an overseer by occupation, but also superior to others like any born sociopath – and he glides through the film unblemished for the most part. But it’s the exceptions to this that unlock things. Swimming in the river with his kids is joyous until he makes a discovery that triggers immediate panic. All involved are scrubbed clean as quickly as possible. Removing any trace of taint is critical. Here, one senses, the smallest mote could chip open a frail facade.

Hedwig seems steelier. The Zone of Interest is so contained, so tight, that an exclaimed threat from her over an hour into the picture to their Jewish maid feels shockingly overt. This is the moment where it feels like Glazer blinks, but perhaps instead it is the moment where Hedwig’s nature goes from implicit to explicit. And it suggests a mountain of pressure locked within. Another crack in the wall.

The sci-fi moods of Under the Skin are rekindled in two striking night sequences shot in a hyper-stylised night vision, in which we watch an unnamed girl fight back against the extreme oppression through surreptitious acts of kindness. Her world – as presented – is literally opposite to that of the Hösses. It’s not exactly subtle, but it is hauntingly, beautifully effective; an assessment you could extend grimly to the picture at large.

While these asides keep us close to the looming locale of Auschwitz, the final third of the picture opens up, following Rudolph to Oranienburg and deeper into the Nazi regime. Uncorking the bottle does release the pressure, and these insidious board room meetings lack the amorphous intensity of the earlier sections. But this in itself provokes the question – where would we rather be? Self-reflection becomes part of the process of watching. And it also instigates Glazer’s grand gambit of a finale, where The Zone of Interest reaches outstretched fingers toward The Act of Killing and a Kubrickian fourth-wall break leads to the most astounding edit of Glazer’s career.

I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s a dynamic shift in paradigm. A form change that manages, weirdly, to conjure memories of Twin Peaks: The Return (one scene in particular), and which I’m already longing to burrow into in a separate piece as it interrogates us and our ability to compartmentalise today; something that current world events have made all-too relevant since the film premiered at Cannes.

The world is shockingly large and filled with horrors. To what extent are we culpable in genocides thousands of miles away if we sit in complacency about them? If our response is to stop looking, to stop hearing? The Zone of Interest has no advantage of geographical remove. The terror is right there. But the questions remain the same. And the sounds – unavoidable in the cocoon of a stricken cinema – are ceaseless.