The Zone of Interest (PG13, 115 mins) in cinemas now. In German with subtitles.
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
This outstanding, unforgettable film by Jonathan Glazer opens with a prolonged blank screen. Bewildering, but the perfect way to introduce a remarkably different work of art.
The blankness seems to be an invitation to viewers to open their minds, to prepare for something important.
Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is on his way up the ranks under the Nazi regime and, as befits his role as commandant of Auschwitz, he and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) live an idyllic rural life in Poland, with their staff, five children and their dog (Dilla) in a large house set amongst Hedwig’s carefully tended roses, dahlias and lilacs beneath a high stone wall, over which is Höss’ workplace, the concentration camp.
While there’s nothing horrific, no victims appear, Glazer implies there’s horror over the wall but subtly, non-judgmentally, he shows that it’s not horror to the Höss family.
An alternative view of the Holocaust, seen from one side only, The Zone of Interest takes us right inside Nazi thinking, lifting the lid on Germany in the lead-up to World War II.
Glazer quietly challenges us to consider how the family’s complicity with genocide has come about, to reconsider what we understand history to be: who did what, how they did it and why.
As Hedwig, Hüller draws us into her highly regulated but outwardly ordinary life of gardening, supervising staff, going on a family picnic with boating and berry picking beside a local river.
Hedwig lives an ideal European woman’s life, despite her knowledge that mass murder is going on over the wall, the delivery of a beautiful fur coat, lipstick still in its pocket, causing her no pause for thought.
The screenplay, co-written by the author of the book of the same title, Martin Amis, and Glazer, is well crafted and spare.
This is one of the reasons the film works so well; others are magnificent acting, documentary-style camera work with long takes, Mica Levi’s dissonant music and Johnnie Burns’ soundscape.
Continuous horrific noises emanate from over the garden wall and ghastly smoke billows from sinister brick chimneys, but to the Höss family, except for Hedwig’s visiting mother, Linna Hensel (Imogen Kogge), there’s nothing worth drawing attention to.
There’s a chilling obliviousness to the torment, an obliviousness that’s underscored when Friedel’s Höss calmly attends a meeting with visiting engineering top brass to agree on a more efficient way of circulating the bodies through the ovens, improving the speed of burn-cool-unload-reload, as if they’re planning improvements to a factory production line.
One of the Höss children’s games even involves one being locked in a greenhouse while another stands outside making gas-chamber-like hissing noises.
Dehumanisation is at the heart of the film, which culminates in a brief visit to Auschwitz as it is today, with the tragically ironic motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes one free) still inscribed on its forbidding gates, its hillock of remnants providing a graphic warning about what humans are capable of doing to each other.
