In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the Nazi Party ruled Germany and set up concentration camps in order to systematically eradicate Jewish people from the planet. We’ve had plenty of well-known films tell the story of Nazi Germany from different perspectives, Schindler’s List (1993), Inglorious Bastards (2009) and Valkyrie (2008) are just a few. Until The Zone of Interest, however, we’ve never had a movie (at least to my knowledge) focus on the mundane, everyday life of a privileged German family during that time.
There are some brilliant strokes in this film. The director, Jonathan Glazer, manages to bring the audience into the horrors of Auschwitz without actually showing the horrors of Auschwitz. We’re meant to be a fly on the wall in this house that’s built just feet from the infamous concentration camp. So we’re seeing what we identify as a normal routine life (getting up, going off to school, turning the lights off before bed, making meals, etc.) with the sounds of unimaginable death always in the distance. Whether it’s gun shots, train whistles from the delivery of new Jews or plumes of smoke relentlessly pulsing from the crematorium, this Nazi family (and us as the audience) is surrounded by the sounds of genocide while they go about their normal lives. Whether they’ve tuned out the horror or they choose to turn a blind eye because they believe in the cause isn’t certain but it’s undeniable to the viewer.
A film like this hits each person differently but an argument could be made that, when Hoss sits in the concentration camp leadership meeting, the film’s message is put into a completely different perspective. The sheer volume of how many camps there were (as represented by the number of attendees) would be terrifying enough but when they start talking about their goals for the year and adjusting their strategies in order to raise numbers, not unlike a business would about third quarter profits, it’s incredibly chilling.
Speaking of things that aren’t certain, The Zone of Interest left a lot of questions on the table. Why did Hoss race home after something hit his leg while fishing? Who was the woman who came to visit him while he was on the phone? Why did he gag multiple times while walking down the stairs? Why was there a black screen for three minutes at the beginning? Why was there a red screen toward the end? Was the girl hiding apples for the prisoners doing it out of sympathy or guilt? When we see a current-day shot of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is that supposed to tell the audience that Hoss had an epiphany of conscience?
Just because there are flashes of brilliance throughout the movie doesn’t mean it’s a brilliant movie. The film is interesting, heartbreaking and extremely uncomfortable. For a project where traditional storytelling is seemingly absent, that’s pretty impressive. On the other hand, a colleague called this “more of an experimental film” which, to me, conveniently dismisses the void of traditional story telling, the questions left unanswered and the wealth of seemingly unnecessary scenes. The bottom line is, I already hated the Nazis. I didn’t need to spend an hour and 45 minutes in a theater to hate them again. The creative way Glazer gets the audience to respond in ways they haven’t experienced before is worthy of praise… but I still have no idea why anyone would voluntarily watch this.
JKG SCORE: 7.0
Untitled Film Project 