Year: 2023
Director: Jonathan Glazer
When I went to see Schindler’s List in the nineties the couple next to me had brought popcorn and cokes, perhaps looking no further than the Spielberg name. Their refreshments remained untouched throughout the film. This I have always thought summed up the issues around Holocaust cinema very succintly.
I have to admit I thought at first I would not go and see Zone of Interest. Glazer can stand in for Spielberg: an auteur making his Holocaust movie on first take seems to lead more in the direction of Life Is Beautiful or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (both unwatched by me) than Shoah. Have we not had enough Holocaust films. There’s even a whole new genre of fiction ‘inspired by true stories’ such as The Tatooist of Auschwitz, The Tailor of Dachau concentration camp’ and so on.
And yet. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are on the rise. As it slips from living memory works of art that tell these stories will become more important, otherwise other stories contesting the magnitude, purpose or basic facts of the Holocaust will be unchallenged. However, if you enter this arena as a film-maker then the bar has to be significantly higher than for almost any other subject-matter you could choose.
Glazer’s film is a loose adaptation of Martin Amis’s second holocaust novel after Time’s Arrow, which retold the Holocaust as a Benjamin Button style backwards story. I’ve not read Zone of Interest, but I gather Glazer has jettisoned all bar the basic historical scenario and characters. Rudolf Hoss, the longest-serving Commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig have created an idyllic family home for themselves and their four children. There’s an alpine garden, swimming pool, sun deck and trellising. The latter is important as it backs onto the wall of the camp.
We follow a working day of Hoss: meeting contractors with new ideas to improve efficiency, being toasted by his team on his birthday, phone calls to superiors. Work scenes alternate with family life: swimming and boating in the local river, picnics and evening meals. Glazer takes Hannah Arendt’s concept of The Banality of Evil and runs with it. Hoss is a mid-ranking but efficient bureaucrat, Hedwig is a rather highly strung wife who is short with the domestic servants. The children are sometimes naughty, but on the whole love and respect their parents.
What lends the first two-thirds of the film its power, as we follow them from room to room, meal to meal, meeting to meeting, breakfast to bedtime is what is over the wall. Chiefly it’s present in the rightly praised extra-ordinary sound design. Shots, shouts, trains, orders and screams are a constant presence – just present enough for you to believe that at home this family could treat them like the sirens, traffic noise and pub drunks that punctuated the nights when I lived in Clapham, and to which most Londoners become swifty inured to. The moments where the camp intrudes into the family home are fleeting and quickly moved on from. A visiting relative is discomforted, there are some used clothes to rifle through. These are flickers at the edge of the protagonists vision, something to swat away in irritation rather than consider. Because if the reality of atrocity is over the fence, you can become inured to anything. Here one family stand for every single person involved, and the question that is as urgent today as seventy years ago. How can an entire population actively conspire – to refuse – to know.
The unwavering focus on the family and their entirely mundane daily routines give the first two-thirds of this film a queasy, unsettling feeling that is absolutely gripping. And perhaps Glazer’s film would have been even better if it had finished there. Instead the final third is dominated by (all factually accurate) plot: Hoss is promoted to head of Department, but he misses the hands-on work and his wife doesn’t want to leave their wonderful home. The focus opens up to Berlin and becomes – still immaculately acted and shot – another film about stories from the Holocaust with actors in uniforms. The uncertainty of the ending, involving a contemporary jump, is an admission that no real narrative ending is possible. Glazer’s first hour – fashioned from that sound design, a flat all-in-focus visual style, actors who appear to be subsumed in their roles, and many other remarkable film-making aspects – sidesteps conventional narrative and in the process delivers something else.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Not a relevant question here.
One final point. There are two reasons to see it the cinema: the aforementioned sound design which deserves all the dolby sound system possible, and that you can walk out and leave this suffocating nightmare behind. You’ll be thinking about the film for days to come, but you won’t associate it with your bookshelves, tivo box and Playstation console.
Great review.
I saw the film the other week. You have produced a far more coherent review than I could have possibly pulled together.
This film looked really interesting, but I’ve become less tolerant of films based on actual events as I’ve got older, especially when they are attempting to convey any kind of social message. The problem is that you are watching fiction, albeit based on reality, but the seams between fiction and reality are never revealed. Dialogue is invented, secondary characters are created and removed to serve the narrative etc. This puts it on the shakiest of ground when it’s held up as ‘historical’. I know documentaries all have their biases, however I would far prefer to watch a well researched documentary on these events rather than the movie.
For clarity, I have no problem with fictional events set in a real past.
Zone of Interest does have real characters in the Auschwitz commandant and his wife and kids, but it clearly presents itself as a work of fiction using real people, in the context of the awful reality of Aschwitz, rather than a historical account of their lives or characters. It’s an unsettling and powerful piece that tells a general truth and is definitely worth your time.
Great review from @moseleymoles, by the way.
You say that Blue Boy, yet look at the comments below where people are discussing the events depicted as real.
It’s this conflict that makes me uncomfortable.
I get the danger – you only need to look at Shakespeare’s history plays to see how a great artist can skew our understanding and perceptions of real historic events and characters. But looking at the comments below I think people are using the film not to discuss specific events, but to reflect on generalities – the horrors of the holocaust, our tendency as humans to allow ourselves to be led into some dark places, or to keep our heads down even when we know things very wrong are happening etc etc. I think that’s exactly what the film is seeking to do.
It’s hard to argue with the contention that as catastrophes slip from living memory, works of art that tell these stories will become more important, otherwise stories contesting the magnitude or basic facts will be unchallenged. But if history tells us anything it’s that the human race has a short memory when it comes to collective fuck-ups. It’s almost as if the species is collectively insane, in that the act of repeating some action over and over again while expecting the outcome to change looks like the collective Homo sapiens MO. I don’t intend to spend any more of my time with art that leaves me shaking my head at the stupidity and venality it portrays; I see enough of those characteristics in muted microcosm just living each day. Did watching this film actually enhance your life in any way other than to admire the soundscape or to briefly reflect on your relatively lucky place in time and space?
That’s a mighty large hill of sand you’re burying your head in.
Surely every so often we have to remind ourselves of the fucked-up world we live in, if only to constantly remind ourselves to, wherever possible, be kind? Just be kind.
(Except, of course, on here where it is perfectly acceptable, for instance, to accuse Dai of having execrable taste in music or laughing at Gary re his Apple Pro Glasses obsession).
“Every so often”?
My point is that I get exactly this sort of reminder every sodding day.
I don’t need an arthouse movie to jog my memory, or to suggest that I should be kind.
So, every day you get a reminder how awful everything is and then you come on here? Shoot yourself: it’s easier for you, easier for everybody else. ( I’m just being kind)
I like to think, when I come on here, that I’ve left most of the stupidity outside.
Just watched it tonight on the TV – powerful stuff perhaps not best suited to a Monday night in downtown Pouzolles
Well, I can’t talk about avoiding art portraying human folly I guess; I’m just working my way through Masters Of The Air, which looks at the same insane global conflict from about 20,000 feet up. But at least it’s posited from the point of view of those engaged in trying to stop the madness rather than to prosecute it. And the aircraft are neat. Perhaps it’s just that sheer proximity of the other side of the garden wall that utterly creeps me out.
@vulpes-vulpes a perfectly valid question and it all depends what you go to the cinema, theatre, concert hall for and why. Yes it caused me to reflect on my personal good fortune to live in safety and comfort, as like many here no doubt I have some family history linking me to these events. I guess ultimately I went to be provoked, questioned, discomforted – all again I think valid things to feel. When I go and see Dune II or (crosses fingers) Top Gun 3 my reasons will be different. Honestly had it got middling reviews I would not have gone, as I mentioned in my review the bar here has to be rightly higher.
Sidebar relating to my experience at Schindler’s List. A friend came with me to the Midland Arts Centre Cinema to see it for a second time. He’d been to see Zone of Interest at a Cineworld and there were people eating popcorn and slurping drinks through it. That probably happened at Schindlers as well, I just didn’t notice it.
Fair enough. On our rather infrequent visits to the flicks these days* we usually expect to be entertained rather than intellectually challenged – for us it tends to be for books to deliver the provocation, the questioning and the discomfort. For instance I’m just reading Noa Tishby’s ‘Israel’ back-to-back with Rashid Khalidi’s ‘100 Years’ War…”, an experience which offers all of the above.
We will certainly be going to Dune II though I might give Top Gun 3 a sidestep in any case! If there’s another Bond we’ll go, plus we’ll make the effort for Gladiator 2 and any other historical or sci-fi romp of sufficient megadom. About the most profound – as in thought-provoking – film I’ve been to see recently (just before Covid) was the terrific National Theatre ‘Julius Caesar’ production with Ben Wishaw.
* We’re some way out of town, and there are very few movies that will tempt us to share popcorn crunching, late arrivals, overheard banal phone conversations, viral coughing etc. after it’s taken us three quarters of an hour to drive to the cinema. I guess we ought to be able NOT to expect those things at a screening of a work such as the film in question, but the lack of poor audience behaviour alone still wouldn’t tempt me!
Your thoughts are very close to Podicle’s yet-to-be-published Theory of Humanity.
In short, humans are collectively stupid; too stupid for the world we have created. The great inventions, breakthroughs etc that humanity has made have been made by outliers. So we live in a world that is the product of genius but inhabited by, and bound to the decisions of, the not-very-bright.
It’s only going to end one way.
Art doesn’t deliver facts. It reveals a truth.
I wrote a play once called Truth Is A Four-Letter Word, because it is, if you want it to be. T,R,U and H. Four letters.
Truh, bruh.
Stephen King wrote “fiction is the truth inside the lie”. A phrase he nicked, of course. Changed a couple of words and claimed it as his. When originally it was Camus or Saucecraft or someone.
It’s a magnificent film, and I agree with pencilsqueezer, both in the generality and in relation to this particular piece of art. The truth revealed here is deeply uncomfortable and confronting.
On Deramdaze’s recommendation in this month’s Blogger Takeover, I took a punt on Saturday lunchtime, as my wife was away and she was not interested in seeing this film.
It’s a horrifying, slow moving story that reveals itself slowly and deliberately. The artier moments (it begins with what seem like five minutes of black screen, the scenes shot in night vision) are jarring. I’d usually use this as a criticism but, on reflection, this film is designed to jar the senses. Like Glazer’s Under the Skin, it’s an unhurried, insistent, uncomfortable film that will stay with me.
More so than any film I’ve seen recently, The Zone Of Interest is a work of art. It’s fascinating disturbing, gripping. A terrific film.
There’s a real sense of just observing people going about their lives – but lives which are horrific in their normality.
I’d say our lives are horrific in their normality. I haven’t seen the film yet, but what I’ve read makes me think of us happily bantering away while unspeakable atrocities are going on within our field of vision (internet having made our field of vision global).
Yes, that’s the wider perspective. We’ve all got a camp wall, over which we can hear all sorts of disturbing noises, but we just get used to it and zone it out.
Although it has only a minimal connection to the film – the title and the setting – I would recommend the Martin Amis novel, one of his best latter day works. I did write a review at the time but I think it must have been on the old site.
Seconded – brilliant novel (and to be honest I wish the film had stuck closer to it)
I wonder how much it was an entire population refusing to know and how much it was the bulk of the population utterly terrified that something similar would happen to them or their families?
It takes incredible bravery to resist where resistance is largely futile and will lead to the unpleasant demise of not just yourself, but also the people you love. We can all tell ourselves we’d have the minerals for it, but no one really knows until the “opportunity” presents itself.
Same story under virtually every authoritarian regime that’s ever existed. Sophie Scholls are few and far between, and most of them end up in unmarked graves, their sacrifices quiet, symbolic and forgotten.
I have family members still with us who lived through Pinochet and the Galtieri junta. They kept their heads down.
Although I was transfixed the first time I saw it, I actually picked up far more the second time.
In one scene, the officer rides into the camp on his horse, freshly showered, clothed, and without a bead of sweat on his brow… the camp is, of course, twenty yards from his front gate. It’s all show!
And I didn’t initially get the night/apple scenes, I did the second time.
I doubt I’ll see a better film this year. It really is (already) a classic.
” Glazer let us into his window on why those scenes are in the film. The first interesting tidbit is that they’re based on a real person’s actions.
“She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer said. He continued, “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”
This is a great historical account, but why add them to a movie that is largely about how apathetic we become to violence?
Glazer was purposeful in his answer, saying, “That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”
I think that answer is critical