Rating: 3.5 out of 5
When I noticed the release of the German movie The Zone of Interest by director Jonathan Glazer at film festivals early in 2023, I believed it to be yet another movie about the Holocaust that addressed a complicated subject in an underdeveloped, overdone, and boring way. After watching this film, it is safe to say that it was like no other film I have watched before, cementing itself as an integral addition to political expressionist cinema.
The film follows the family of Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Freidel) who is stationed at the largest and most brutal Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz. Höss and his family, consisting of his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and his three children, live in a house right next to the camp, hoping to build a life there. The family is shown living their daily lives, completely indifferent to the sounds of screaming and killing that can be heard from the neighboring concentration camp.
In the last scene Höss is seen exiting his office in Berlin and walking down a stairwell that gets darker as he goes down. With every couple steps, Höss retches but is unable to throw up. While he goes down the stairs, flashes of the future are shown with janitors wiping down display cases getting the Auschwitz museum ready for opening day many years after the war. The film ends with Höss walking down the last step into complete darkness.
This film was courageous in that it took on challenging ideas of indifference and the banality of evil. Höss and his family were portrayed as people who didn’t know or care about the extent of the atrocities they were committing.
Certain scenes in this film were chilling to the bone and horrifying because of the extent of the characters’ indifference. Scenes such as the one at the end in which the janitors were cleaning display cases of human remains and hundreds of burned shoes from the gas chambers to prepare the museum in present day also showed just how desensitized our present society is to the horrors of the Holocaust.
In addition to the interesting thematic elements, the movie was a display of filmmaking mastery. The film was harsh but beautiful to look at, using sharp, cool-blue tones throughout to create an atmosphere of hostility, introducing distance and detachment from the characters. The sound design in this movie was some of the best I’veseen, the highlight being the use of screams and gas as white noise in the background. The sound and lighting design actually told the story instead of enhancing it for effect, which I’ve seen in very few films.
What brought the film down was an absence of the most basic quality of a film: entertainment. This film was simply not engaging with minimal dialogue, a lack of plot, little to no character development, and a very slow-moving story.
It is clear that the intent of the film was not to entertain but to express the complex thoughts of an experimental director. Many elements of the film are easily lost to the average viewer and the film felt like something only a filmmaker of Glazer’s caliber would truly understand. If the audience isn’t engaged, then they can’t possibly grasp the intended social message. A film must be thoughtful and entertaining, and this film only attained one of these qualities.
Unfortunately, an intellectual snooze-fest is something that will never get through to the average audience.