The Zone of Interest (2023)

Chilling - The Zone of Interest review by AER

Perhaps one of the finest films about Auschwitz. It's a question of what makes us a monster and what makes us human - and that its possible to be both. It's an astonishing film that everyone should see and all the more pertinent given the current political climate. 10/10

Chilling Holocaust Film - The Zone of Interest review by GI

In this study of the banality of a family living their lives in a large house and with a beautiful garden, spending their time swimming and picnicking in the gorgeous countryside, comes an oppressive soundtrack and a disquieting editing from the family laughing and conversing to sudden night scenes and strange colours. Because this is the Höss family, the father Rudolf is the commandant of Auschwitz Extermination camp and the film is set in 1943 at the height of the Holocaust. The sounds of random gunshots, screams and the all pervading thump of the industry of the camp permeate the film from over the huge, barbed wire topped wall that boundaries the family garden and from where the constant black smoke billows from the tall crematorium chimney. Director Jonathan Glazer doesn't show the atrocities that are occurring within the camp he simply shows the everyday life of this abhorrent family as they go about their lives ignoring and eventually not noticing the sounds. The narrative also follows Rodolf Höss' career as he is promoted and moved back to Berlin to plan more horror and his wife, Hedwig's (Sandra Hüller) demand that she and the family stay in their house as it's the best place to raise the children. For a film where little happens other than watching the coming and going of a family privileged under the Nazi regime who talk as if the activities on the other side of the wall are normal and only provide good things for them (there's a conversation about clothes that the family have that have been confiscated from the prisoners) this is an uncomfortable film to watch. It's a disturbing study of the Holocaust and interwoven into this banality are night scenes shot on a thermal camera giving the images a ghostly quality of a young Polish girl who hides apples at the construction sites that in the day the prisoners are forced to work in. The combination is a fascinating film that leaves a big impression even though it's a difficult and emotional one.

Quietly horrific tale at the doors of Auschwitz - The Zone of Interest review by PD

Hannah Arrendt’s famous phrase “The Banality of Evil,” gets beaten to death by anyone trying to describe ordinary folk who commit extraordinary crimes, be they fictional villains or historical figures who shock us both with their psychopathy and their everyday, “quiet next door neighbour” dullness. But it’s best applied as she intended, to the monsters who perpetrated the Holocaust. That routine heartlessness, cruelty and widespread complicity is at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s quietly horrific film.

Very loosely based on the Martin Amis novel, which fictionalised the family life and sexual shenanigans of the commandant of Auschwitz, the film is a cryptic, underexplained tale that buries us in banality. Most of revolves around a company man — SS camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) - depicted here as a casual careerist, hobnobbing with industrialists looking to improve their profits in the “manufacturing” side of the vast German concentration camp, looking for efficiencies from contractors who have designed a quicker, faster, mass-extermination-ready crematorium, pocketing stolen loot and enjoying the comforts of slave labour, not just for the camp, but for keeping his comfortable home just outside the gates. But his performance is overshadowed by that of Sandra Hüller, who plays an all-too convincing Hedwig, the matriarch of the household, mother of five Höss children, who jokes to her visiting mother that the officers’ wives and perhaps even the inmates, refer to her as “The Queen of Auschwitz.” She may well be the most monstrous figure here, representative perhaps of every German who “doesn’t want to know,” but we know does. She parcels out confiscated clothing, tries on a stolen fur coat, and when a young servant is clumsy, inattentive or otherwise provocative, Hedwig lets drop that she could have 'your ashes scattered over the fields'. She knows exactly what’s happening, and what her entire lifestyle is built on. One of many chilling moments has their Hitler youth tween son sorting “teeth” with gold fillings at bedtime, something he admits to when his much younger brother wants to know what he’s doing under the covers.

The film opens with a blank screen and the sounds of the camp captured in the distance — manual labour, shouts and occasional muffled screams, distant gunshots. This echoes throughout the film, with every walk through the garden, every open window in the house underscored with what goes on under the smoke we see billow from chimneys from the heart of the death factory. The sounds, when we notice them, are disturbing enough, but when we stop noticing them, as the Höss family do, that’s even more disturbing. Glazer’s most artistic touches are showing a young woman sneaking around the edges of the camp after dark, picking apples off fruit-filled trees, hiding them on outside-the-gates work sites so that the starving people inside can find them as they dig or load coal, sequences filmed in stark black and white night negative footage. The violence is always out of sight and muffled, even when we hear it, but there’s no denying that it’s there, and Hedwig’s mother plays a crucial part in the action, since only she is sensitive enough to flee from the scene.

It's perhaps arguable that ultimately the film is rather shallow, of use only to those naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil, and there is very little to grasp here in terms of character, only concepts. However, it's still a compelling, original piece.