The Zone of Interest

 

A short answer to the question "what makes director Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest such an extraordinary film experience" is the manner in which he has taken familiar horrors and made them new.

Zone is the startling and chilling account of a commandant of the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp and his family living next to the razor wire and billowing chimneys, clearly at peace with what was happening just over the wall.

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller play the highly efficient and ambitious Nazi officer and his vain and equally officious wife. They sleep separately, exhibit little caring or affection for one another and see to their duties in keeping with the Fuhrer's orders.

Glazer keeps the human suffering and extermination off-screen but manages to make what is presented -- the soulless, spiritual and emotional hollowness of this family -- as repellant as scenes of lines of men, women and children being marched into gas chambers. The couple's four children play in the family courtyard and pool as shots ring out in the distance, signalling the pistol deaths of prisoners, paying no more attention to it than they would to birdsong -- maybe less.

Meetings of camp commanders and annihilation engineers are clinically strategic and include talk of transport, forced labor, cremation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners a week. These passages, while ghastly, are not as disturbing as the depiction of the family's housekeepers dividing up clothing stripped from camp women or a teenaged boy admiring this collection of harvested teeth.

The Zone of Interest is an artistic work, methodical in its pacing that asks do horrible people commit horrors or does the imposition of horrifying visions and beliefs create horrible people.

I suspect both are true.