I give credit to the immense power of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest that the film still shook me even though I know the plot and have been digesting thoughts about it since its award-winning debut at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. And anyone who knows the work of Glazer can testify that his films are alienating, provocative, and at times punishing in their formal technique. In spite of all those possible obstacles, The Zone of Interest exceeded my expectations and stands as an unnerving example of the still unexplored boundaries of the Holocaust drama.
Opening with a queasy overture by regular collaborator Mica Levi that plunges us into the darkness after a slow fading title card, The Zone of Interest alternatingly then begins in the bright sun as a family is playing within a nicely manicured yard. Father Rudolph (Christian Friedel) and mother Hedwig (Sandra Huller) appears as the stable and guiding force to their four children at leisure.
It’s only after the screen eventually fills with a cacophony of off-screen gun shots, screams, and constant dog barking that the location of this family idyll is revealed as a concrete fence away from Auschwitz, and father Rudolph is the camp commandant. Beyond the audible cues and incessant rings of smoke that burrow into the sky at the top of the film’s frame from its death furnaces, Glazer isn’t much interested in directly accounting the atrocities of the Holocaust, which makes his film all the more unique. One especially shocking scene is a mélange of flower images that play out over the agonizing scream of someone…. somewhere. The idea of beauty and horror are smashed together with sledgehammer precision, but it’s still an effective dichotomy of sound and image that serves its purpose masterfully.
And so it goes for the rest of the film, spelling out the mundane day-to-day activities of this German family behind their sealed off universe. Tracked by stationary cameras and surrounded by beautiful negative space, we soon know the layout of their grounds better than we do our favorite sitcom sets, and the nightly routine of shutting off lights and lumbering to bed becomes as equally important as the nursery rhymes Rudolph gently reads to his restless daughters. Huller is quietly chilling as the mother, reveling in the fur coats she receives as presents and snickering to her husband at bedtime to look for chocolates the next day. The handling of their children is even more devastating. In the only scene that gives us a translation from the voices over the other wall, we hear a German soldier instruct another to drown someone for fighting over an apple, which elicits a quiet “don’t do that again” from Rudolph’s youngest son before he returns to his game of dice. Like his mother obsessed with the diagrams of her garden and his older brother necking with a girl behind the house, the banality of evil seems omniscient and fully ingrained within even the youngest.
In his previous film, Under the Skin, Scarlet Johansson played an alien who literally sucked the soul out of men she picked up driving around Glasgow. Imagine if the black liquid nightmare of those scenes were all encompassing, and that’s the trance-inducing mood that spins for the entirety of The Zone of Interest. There were times I expected something dreadful to happen to one of the family members….. as if the universe were exacting its own revenge on them. But that’s not this film. And when something akin to a narrative takes shape towards the end of the film involving the bureaucratic rise of Rudolph through the Nazi ranks, Glazer again defies easy exposition, choosing to link the present and the past in a quiet, ghostly way. Rudolph himself may not be haunted, but The Zone of Interest reveals the sad absorption of death amongst the marbled hallways and manicured gardens will never be quiet again.
The Zone of Interest opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on Friday January 19th.
Dallas Film Now. 