Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writers: Martin Amis and Jonathan Glazer
Stars: Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam
Synopsis: The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
Writer/director Johnathan Glazer has only made four movies in a span of 23 years. Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), and Under The Skin (2013) are all unique in his approach to a story, choosing a more isolating tone with his characters and being very omniscient. Review wise, Glazer’s work is polarizing because of his unusual style. Then, there is his recent film which premiered at Cannes this year. His first movie in a decade, it is a Holocaust drama that is unlike any other film about the Holocaust you will ever see.
Using Martin Amis’ novel as the basis, Glazer’s adaptation differs in the same way Paul Thomas Anderson created There Will Be Blood from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! The first half of the novel is present on screen, but the second half is discarded for a more original storyline that carries one single element – in both cases, moral bankruptcy – to the very end. Whereas Amis wrote a fictional character, Glazer uses the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his family for his character study. The concentration camp itself is really not important because there is no need to see inside.
The banality of evil, as famously coined by Hannah Arendt in her writing about Nazi organizer Adolf Eichmann, is up close to us when we are introduced to the Hoss family at the beginning. The family includes Rudolf Hoss, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), their young children, and their helpers who all live outside of Auschwitz. The wall is there and the tops of the chimneys are seen, but that is it. There are sounds of gunfire and commands being yelled, but no peeks inside. All the action is of the family’s happiness in the sun with their dog and playing in the river and in the backyard pool. It is as if everything is normal and nothing is happening.
Every frame, every angle through the lenses of Glazer and cinematographer Lukas Zal (Cold War) is meticulous. There are not many close-ups of the characters, preferring to have the entire room with the characters in the frame. When Rudolf learns he is to be transferred to another camp, Hedwig refuses to go along with him because their home is so idyllic to raise a family. She dares not uproot everyone to move to a less favorable location. Their discussion on a river bank is shot from behind, never in front of them because they never spoke truthfully of what is actually happening. Hedwig is as ruthless as her husband in just not mentioning what is really going. They don’t mention what is happening over there and are able to just block it out of their minds.
The film’s title refers to an area of 25 square miles that surrounds Auschwitz because the Nazi’s, always the effective propagandists, never revealed the camp’s actual purpose. Glazer somehow perfects creating a horror movie without a single scene of violence being shown. You only see a family swimming, fishing, and picnicking. A group of Nazis talking about the Final Solution in one meeting, or Rudolf Hess seeing his doctor complaining of an odd abdominal pain. This is just normal to them. Mica Levi reunites with Glazer with a score that is as horrifying as the picture, sucking us in with darkness on the screen that seems to be there forever before the first scene and the credits begin to roll.
At the core of The Zone of Interest is how cold-blooded these people were living next to a crime scene with no concern. The juxtaposition Glazer uses can be even more terrifying than the idea that the sounds and smell of death just do not bother anybody. It is a living example of the meme “This is fine” while fire burns all around. But, this is no joke when talking about a subject that, once again, is timely with current events today. There is no need to show shootings, slashings, and burnings when real-life apathy and the living artifacts about it are still here to witness.
