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Rating: Glazer's fourth feature film is the movie of the year along with Poor Things by Lanthymos.
The Zone of Interest has garnered 5 nominations and won 2 Academy Awards. The film was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, received 3 nominations at the Golden Globes, 9 nominations and won 3 BAFTAs, 5 nominations and won an award at the European Film Awards. The film was honored at the National Board, received 1 nomination at the Critics Choice Award, 1 nomination at the Spirit Awards.
Another film about the Holocaust (par excellence) then.
The film is highly original, particularly regarding filming techniques and photography. From Wikipedia's notes:
The filming took place in the second half of 2021 in Auschwitz. Remote-operated cameras were utilized in the residence of the Höß, recreated by production designer Chris Oddy, using natural light and allowing the actors to move freely within the scene while being filmed from more than ten angles simultaneously.
Indeed, the photography, the natural light—many sequences were shot in broad daylight on beautiful sunny days in a bucolic and serene setting—is magnificent. The same goes for the sound; the film won the Oscar for sound, as well as for best foreign-language film. The framing of the shots is also of exquisite quality. Now, let's get to the second peculiarity (originality) of the film: the HOW.
How is the Holocaust addressed? From a perspective rarely seen before: that of the family of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß, an SS member and the first commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The device is indeed powerful, the passing of the days of this "perfect" German family, with 5 little children in tow, the dog, the servants. The residence is adjacent to the concentration camp. They go to the pond for a swim, a little boat trip, a picnic in the garden, there's a little pool with a slide. Around the perimeter, the concentration camp fence stands, which is ugly… I'll grow some climbing ivy to cover it up a bit… Rudolf's wife says to her mother invited for the occasion …he calls me the queen of Auschwitz she says, half pleased and half amused. The mother will stay overnight but will have trouble sleeping, the crematoria are close by and always operational, even at night. The old lady will get out of bed and pull back the curtain to watch, in one of the most suggestive and disturbing sequences.
The choice to make people hear but not see the horror proves to be spot-on, creating a sense of unease, of nausea, amplified by the continuous and reiterated family routine that indeed occupies a very wide space in terms of screentime, often generating a sense of boredom regarding the film itself, which has no plot, no real development. But in this long and eerie compendium of the perfect German family, Glazer inserts brief nightmarish sequences. The girl who at night picks apples for the prisoners, in black and white infrared, while Rudolf's voice-over narrates the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale to the little ones to put them to sleep, remains memorable.
Another strong point of The Zone of Interest is undoubtedly the soundtrack, truly powerful, thunderous, chilling, by Mica Levi, a young British singer-songwriter and composer, who in 2013 already composed the soundtrack for Glazer's Under the Skin. The music is a bomb that explodes for a few seconds, a gunshot, and brands and seals the horror masterfully.
Let's get to the finale then, saying it's terrific is an understatement… I almost never use the adjective I'm about to write: GENIUS…
***SPOILER***…where Rudolf, in the dead of night, descends the stairs from his office in Berlin and begins to have bouts of vomiting, then looks around the corridor of the huge building to see if anyone has seen him, with an air of deep bewilderment or guilt (??). The sequence is intercut and shifts to the present day, where a group of workers cleans the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, moving among the gas chambers, crematoria, and the rooms where thousands of personal belongings of the victims are kept. For me, those bouts are the soul wishing to leave the filthy body of the criminal butcher monster. ***END SPOILER***
It's a film that lingers in the mind, truly does not leave one indifferent, and deserves a second viewing to understand it better.
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By Anatoly
"The Zone of Interest is perhaps the film that most illustrates this concept through image representation."
The genocide is off-screen and thus even more disturbing, because the normality with which it is discussed and executed reminds us of how it was a technical and bureaucratic matter like any other.
