Year: 2023
Country: UK, USA, Poland
Language: German, Polish, Yiddish
Genre: Drama, War, History
Director/Screenwriter: Jonathan Glazer
Based on the novel by Martin Amis
Music: Mica Levi
Cinematography: Lukasz Zal
Editor: Paul Watts
Cast:
Christian Friedel
Sandra Hüller
Johann Karthaus
Luis Noah Witte
Nele Ahrensmeier
Lilli Falk
Stephanie Petrowitz
Imogen Kogge
Max Beck
Medusa Knopf
Ralph Herforth
Freya Kreutzkam
Sascha Maaz
Julia Polaczek
Rating: 8.5/10
For any artist with a moral compass, it is a sacrosanct imperative to implement their creation on the Holocaust, to ceaselessly reminds the world such manmade atrocities could actually happen to humanity not even a century ago. Glazer’s long-awaited fourth feature THE ZONE OF INTEREST is the latest entrant that manages to depict the harrowing events with an innovative difference and reaps awards galore, including two Oscars.
If László Nemes’s similarly Oscar-winning SON OF SAUL (2015) fastidiously limits the horror in its protagonist’s peripheral visions, Glazer goes even further, more obliquely but ingeniously, in the artistic direction. In THE ZONE OF INTEREST, which serves as a very nominal adaptation of Martin Amis’s titular novel, the Nazi regime’s inhuman enormity is strictly unseen, obviating audience from the visual violence and cruelty that has been utilized umpteenth and risks of brutalization.
Instead Glazer and his Oscar-winning sound team create an intricate soundscape that pervades the film from stem to stern. There is an incessant buzz of a running engine that shrouds the residence of Rudolf Höss (Friedel), the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife Hedwig (Hüller), which is separated from the camp by a mere garden wall. It morphs into an omnipresent background noise that efficaciously deadens the auditory sensorium of the household from the ongoing pandemonium inside the camp. Occasionally, when gunshots or kerfuffles break through the sound barrier, they disrupt the residence’s semblance of normalcy and give their listeners (audience included) pause for thought. Ever curious of experiencing the sensation of living nearby a purgatory? welcome to the Höss paradise!
Even more unnerving is Mica Levi’s dehumanized, uncanny score, which is only intermittently strewn into the film. But when you have the patience to sit through the closing credits, amid all the arrhythmical, cacophonous chords that swamp your aural faculty, you might suspect a case of auditory hallucination if you detect human screams among them, it is the keen from purgatory that rounds off Glazer’s masterpiece.
For its imagery, THE ZONE OF INTEREST hews to a practical and natural lighting, an austere aesthetic in settings, and the unadorned camera placement to demystify and demythologize the daily life of a Nazi family while parceling out some lead-ins or aftermath of the vile goings-on: a pair of bloodstained boots, a human bone found in the stream, an official Nazi meeting, a sexual transaction, the use of human ashes as fertilizers, or that penetrating, mephitic smell wafting during the night. All lead to a poignant montage that bluntly whisks audience away to the present, a group of janitors cleaning in the the Auschwitz Museum, with the mountainous evidences in sight, then cuts back to Rudolf’s own submerging into total darkness. Glazer’s visual syntax is impeccably unique and effectual.
Both Friedel and Hüller dive into their unsympathetic roles with adamant conviction, Rudolf and Hedwig have their own idées fixes that might keep their conscience dormant, he is particularly keen to streamline the cremation process and she regards the blossoming family garden as the upmost achievement, unwilling to relocate and relish in the title as “the Queen of Auschwitz”, Hüller is most commendable in normalizing Hedwig’s oblivious acquiescence and spitting out her völkisch brittleness toward the subservient Polish skivvies. The couple’s relationship is deficient in passion, spark and warmth, but built upon their privileges and compromises. In other words, they are normal people corrupted by the “banality of evil”. But, admittedly, Glazer does pull some punches when it comes to signify the insidious comorbidity to the individuals (especially the family’s young brood) of that.
A modicum of common reaction to the camp is represented by Hedwig’s mom (a spry Kogge), visiting from Germany, whose diurnal pride in her daughter curdles into nocturnal terror when she realizes what is happening in the camp. But the most striking visuals are the images captured by a thermal camera, a young Polish servant who sneaks out in the dead of night and hides food for the prisoners (which is base on the true story Glazer has discovered). Technically, it is not her body but her body heat that glows in the pitch black, a felicitously spiritual metaphor of hope, decency and bravery that resides in every pulsating human heart. THE ZONE OF INTEREST is an instantly canonical anti-war pièce de résistance whose urgency and topicality cannot be overstated at this crucial point.
referential entries: Glazer’s UNDER THE SKIN (2013, 8.2/10), SEXY BEAST (2000, 7.4/10); László Nemes’s SON OF SAUL (2015, 7.4/10).
Cinema Omnivore 