CANNES – If anyone tells you the world doesn’t need any more films about the holocaust or the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in 2023, we’d suggest you politely correct them. Despite over eighty years of cinema on the subject, there continue to be new stories waiting to be told (and some re-told). Moreover, as demonstrated in Jonathan Glazer’s impressive new work, “The Zone of Interest,” which debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival tonight, there are also new ways of telling them. And, often, a filmmaker’s vision can open our eyes to the reality of horrors we thought we understood with a startling new perspective.
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“Zone” begins with an almost 5-minute symphonic overture by composer Mica Levi against a stark black frame. The first true image on screen is the one associated with this review. A seemingly innocuous family relaxing near a pristine lake somewhere, based on their attire, in Europe. As they collect their belongings and head home the scenario begins to unfold. It’s the 1940s and this family, incredibly, lives right next door to a concentration camp in a Nazi-occupied land. And their home belongs to none other than the infamous commander of Auschwitz himself, Rudolf Höss.
Partially based on Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, Glazer slowly lets the audience gaze into the everyday lives of Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children. The family’s home and Hedwig’s meticulously designed private garden go right up to the fortified walls of the prison camp. As the children play in the backyard, surprise their father with a rowboat for his birthday, or go swimming in the makeshift pool, the ambient sound of the horrors occurring on the other side of the wall are omnipresent. The executions, screams, and the almost non-stop loud churn of the crematory ovens. And it’s not contained to just the outdoors. The family dinners, breakfasts, and sleepless nights are accompanied by the non-stop soundtrack of what’s occurring to, as Hedwig casually refers to them, “the Jews over the wall.” And, yet, they somehow block it all out. Just as the emaciated prisoners who are charged with upkeeping Hedwig’s garden or washing the commander’s boots are ignored like invisible stagehands meant to serve them. They have simply made themselves oblivious to the pain of others.
It’s easy to assume someone such as Hoss, who was responsible for the death of over 1 million Jews, would be heartless to his victims’ suffering. What’s astounding is not only his wife’s blatant inhumanity (at one point she gleefully recalls how after finding a hidden diamond in a tube of toothpaste she ordered more just in case there was more to be found) or how her girlfriends rummage through the stolen clothes of female prisoners but how easily their own children drown it out. The only person who seems to exhibit a shred of private remorse is Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge), who upon her first visit cannot ignore the copper glow of the fiery furnace on the other side of the fence blasting through her bedroom window.
As the film progresses you likely won’t have much sympathy for the Höss family’s comparably mundane domestic issues, but they do increasingly seem more and more recognizable. That’s partially thanks to Glazer’s ability to forge a genuine sense of intimacy with the proceedings. Perhaps it’s also due to the lack of an overall orchestral score or the director’s genius in portraying these events without any hint of an overtly cinematic filter. Notably, the result is not reminiscent of a documentary – far from it, the camera is often too far away from its subjects. Instead, it’s as though you’re looking through a window. It’s as though you could easily walk into many of these scenes as if they were occurring in your own neighborhood.* This changes somewhat, for better or worse, in the latter third of the film when Höss is reassigned to Oranienburg, Germany.
*Expect Glazer to speak on how he technically pulled this off in the months and years ahead.
Less of a segue into the world of experimental film than his last feature effort, 2013’s wonderous “Under the Skin,” Glazer is still one to push the boundaries of conventional narrative filmmaking. For “Zone of Interest,” he often cuts from the Höss storyline to an inverted black-and-white negative image of a young girl hiding fruit among the gravel quarries for the prisoners. This character is actually based on a real woman who Glazer met and interviewed while researching this project before she passed away at the age of 94. It’s perhaps the one element of the film that is not clear enough for the viewer but is an obvious counterpoint to the Germans living in a blissfully sunny world, clearly complicit as the Nazi atrocities occur around them.
Glazer also makes a unique choice toward’s the end of the film that will undoubtedly stir conversation. It’s one that reminds you he’s not intent on pulling your heartstrings. He’s much more intrigued with making you think. Making you consider that this authoritarian scenario isn’t that far off from increasingly fascist acts in our own society today. And that, frankly, is one of “Zone’s” great accomplishments. This is a film you can dissect for hours. A movie full of details and creative choices that will spur debate and passion. Another work of Glazer’s full of images that may haunt you for weeks. And well worth almost the decade it took to get here. [A-]
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