The Zone of Interest (2023) (German Language)- BFI London Film Festival 2023

Review

105min

Genre:       Fact-Based, Drama

Director:     Jonathan Glazer

Cast:         Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Freya Kreutzkam…and more

Writers:     Jonathan Glazer and Martin Amis

-Synopsis-

During War War II in the house and garden next to Auschwitz, the camp commandant tries to build an idyllic family life in the shadow of the horror he oversees, only to be complicated by the reality of what is being masked and the complications brought by Nazi bureaucracy and a possible promotion in this adaptation the Martin Amis novel from the writer/director of ‘Sexy Beast’ and ‘Under the Skin’.

A decade after entrancing indie film audiences with his mesmerising and moodily mysterious extra-terrestrial British exploration of the human condition with 2013’s ‘Under the Skin’, London filmmaker Jonathan Glazer finally returns to the feature film fold with a personal and sobering project many years in-the-making. Unfolding his director’s chair and his pulling out his quill to adapt the Martin Amis novel and further ground it in the history of the Third Reich’s “Final Solution” and its architects—delivering a bold, subtly unsettling and unforgettable domestic drama study of the banality of evil.

Christian Friedel stars as impassive Auschwitz camp commandant and stoic family man Rudolf Höss, a high-level Nazi officer supported by his dutiful wife and matriarch Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) in occupied Poland of 1943, as they tend to their lush landscape garden and nurture domestic bliss with their children and the local Nazi community in the shadow of the atrocity right next door. But their consciously oblivious and deliberate indifference to the callous and systematic suffering on their doorstep—and their central role in it—is soon challenged by the machinations of the Nazi machine and a visit from Hedwig’s mother Linna (Imogen Kogge), threatening their dream home and the slice of family heaven they’ve carved up from the pie of true evil.

It’s a risky and daunting task to make a Holocaust movie and provide true cinematic context to the relatively recent darkness of the exploitation and extermination of the Jews and displaced peoples by the Nazis, and since 1993 when Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ brought a new level of pathos and artistry to the sobering sub-genre, many filmmakers have injected new dimensions to the tradition with films like ‘The Pianist’, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ and ‘Son of Saul’.

Now British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer—himself of Jewish ancestry—adds his own perspective by taking a bold new direction into kitchen sink drama, applying a layer of historical relevance to the Martin Amis novel and using the “Final Solution” and its architecture as the backdrop for a domestic story like no other, and to striking effect. Yet despite having few clear or overt depictions of the war or the holocaust, and limiting the inhumanity to distant background sights & sounds of industrial genocide, Glazer manages to make the experience no less scarring and unsettling, while introducing the displeasure of disturbing domesticity to the sub-genre.

Stripped bare of stylisation or music for most of the film and defined by the soft sounds of family life and rural bliss, the horror next door is deliberately kept at arm’s length by the director while the restrained drama on show is occasionally punctured by the misery of a world at war outside the Höss family’s little bubble. Glazer not only employs the distant sounds of systematic genocide at Auschwitz but also injects the occasional visually striking and otherworldly surrealist nightmare sequence, with the music to match thanks to a jolting and atmospherically ominous synth score from experimental musician turned composer Mica Levi (Under the Skin, Monos), all of which deliberately jolts the audience out of their uncomfortable domestic trance.

Yet it’s the relatively serene and simple narrative juxtaposed against the sinister setting and chilling context which has the greatest impact in ‘The Zone of Interest’, and it falls on the shoulders of the two German actors playing the Höss couple to set the tone and sell the drama, and fortunate for Glazer that both his stars are on such form and fully understood the assignment. Friedel and Hüller as the Höss clan patriarch & matriarch deliver sterling and subtle performances with a stoicism betraying an inner turmoil, delivering such an effortlessly relatable dynamic that you’ll fall into empathising with this traditional mother/father team, before you remember who and what they are—a perfect husband & wife portrait of professional wickedness and homely passive complicity in unspeakable crimes.

Glazer’s first foray into period drama is clearly a carefully considered and personal project many years in the making, and the result is an impressive adaptation of the Martin Amis novel more boldly rooted in history, a muted yet hypnotic meditation on the banality of evil, the domesticity of deviance, and the bureaucracy of brutality. Presenting the family-friendly face of industrial genocide and carefully planned ethnic cleansing—the type of political PR and social conditioning which helped the rise of the Nazis and the “3^rd Reich” in the first place while creating the conditions for the holocaust—as ‘The Zone of Interest’ serves as a timely reminder of what can happen if we sleepwalk through history.

The Bottom Line…

A measured and restrained German wartime domestic drama with real teeth and a subtle surrealist nightmare quality, with ‘The Zone of Interest’ Jonathan Glazer tackles the holocaust from a rare perspective and creates an unforgettable warning story with an entrancing and unsettling study of the banality of evil, and the respectable face of an oppressive and murderous regime—marking a striking and memorable return to feature filmmaking for the bold British filmmaker.

‘The Zone of Interest’ is out on the 2nd of February 2024 in UK cinemas.

Similar films you may like (Home Video)

Son of Saul (2015)

In Auschwitz at the height of the Holocaust; a Hungarian member of the “Sonderkommando“, a special unit of Jewish prisoners forced to assist in running the Nazi death-camps, finds solemn purpose in caring for the body & soul of a young victim of the “final solution” in this harrowing Oscar-winning Hungarian drama.

Directed by László Nemes and starring Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár and Urs Rechn among others.

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