The Zone of Interest

2023's THE ZONE OF INTEREST takes its title from a plot of land near the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during WWII.  Where SS troops held administrative offices, ran training facilities, and seized agriculture for profit.  Writer/director Jonathan Glazer adapted Martin Amis' novel, opting to center on a commandant and his family who settle in a tony estate next to the camp.  A garden wall separates the comforts of home from rounds of gunshots and yelling from next door. 

Bellows of smoke rising skyward are routinely visible but conveniently ignored.  Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) go about raising their children and (with some of the recruited locals) tending to household chores.  Glazer moves without urgency from scene to scene.  We feel a grip of portent.

We gradually learn more, but this is not a work of plot mechanics or revelation.  I admire THE ZONE OF INTEREST for showing and not telling.  Sometimes dialogue will inform us of new developments, as Hoss is promoted to deputy inspector and told to relocate near Berlin.   This will allow for some drama between husband and wife, but this is also not a film of emotional fireworks.  Not sustained, anyway.  Glazer's approach is methodical and often static.  His direction is quietly austere.  He favors long shots, appropriately.  The banality of a pleasant but largely uneventful life occupies most of the film, all the more horrifying in light of the reality outside that wall. 

The arm's length of the characters and their scenario unfortunately translates to a distance from the film.  It often feels like an art installation that occasionally demonstrates life and motion.   Follow up viewings may create more of an immediacy, though for me they are unlikely.

The film may have been more effective as a short, avoiding repetition and possible dilution of theme.

There are moments of more tangible horror.  Like those hallways.  Never have they seemed as sinister in film.  At least not since THE SHINING or BARTON FINK.  The rather experimental stylistics - mainly during the sequences of the Polish girl hiding apples at prisoner work sites - run hot and cold. 

THE ZONE OF INTEREST speaks of all of us.  It should convict the complacent and comfortably numb.  Those who seek to isolate themselves.  The deniers.  The film should also prompt the education of the alarmingly numerous masses that seem to have a spotty handle on history.  The kind they may be doomed to repeat. 

It is also likely to spark latter day parallels that are not necessarily valid.