The Zone Of Interest

At its heart, it’s a film about the banality of evil. The way that people can be complicit in the carrying out of evil acts while carrying on their daily lives without any impact on their moral compass. Not even a twitch in another direction. It’s also about people who casually choose to look the other way, ignore the problem completely or are ignorant as to what’s really going on. Until slightly later on in the film, it’s not established where the film is set. There’s an idyllic garden where Rudolf and Hedwig drink, grow vegetables, take in the sun and play with their children. There’s a visible guard watchtower, barbed wire and a chimney just over the wall though. There are rumbling sounds, muffled shouts, occasional screams and plumes of smoke. This is Auschwitz. Even the word alone evokes images of horror burned into our minds from newsreel footage.However, Glazer shows remarkable restraint throughout. He doesn’t feel the need to peek over the wall, instead letting the immersive sound design do its work while our minds fill in the horrific remainder. This is underscored by Mica Levi’s sparsely-used but unsettling score. This is a film to see in the cinema with other people around you for a shared experience. It might just be the most disturbing 12A in recent memory, a film that crawls Under The Skin and makes a home there – as it should. Glazer further immerses his actors and the audience with static cameras that capture small details and keeps the characters at a remove from the audience (a Glazer trademark). It’s not an airless chamber piece though. The story occasionally moves beyond the house to a nearby river, roads and a packed meeting room where Rudolf and other commandants squabble over The Final Solution while trying to maintain a certain percentage of the workforce to keep the camps running in their grim business. Or, to their minds, just another day in the office.

While it’s loosely adapted from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, Glazer has gone in his own direction by putting the real-life Rudolf Höss front and centre. The longest-serving Commandant of Auschwitz is portrayed with a calculated air by Christian Friedel, a man who gives orders and lets others worry about the consequences. Sandra Hüller also does sterling work as Hedwig, a mother who is blind to the children just over the wall being converted into ash. As good as the actors are though, the real star is Glazer’s intensely-focused direction which is chilly and chilling in equal measure, locking the audience into its steely glare to confront the realities of the Holocaust. This is further reinforced by the end coda, a reminder and warning that such events are re-occurring once again in other warzones. Its relevance could not be more timely. The Zone Of Interest is a fine film that offers a different but no less important window into the Holocaust. It simply demands to be seen.

Rating: 4 / 5

Review by Gareth O’Connor