The Zone of Interest

Grade: B+

The Zone of Interest ends in the present day, with footage of employees at the Auschwitz Museum cleaning windows, sweeping, organizing, and generally getting ready for what’s just another day at work for them – blissfully far removed from the horror of so long ago. The rest of the film takes place in the days when the concentration camp was operational. Our heroes – and I only use that word to mean they are the main players in the movie – are a German family. They live a pleasant life on a gorgeous property right outside of the camp, where the husband/father works.

Director Jonathan Glazer’s credits include numerous music videos for Radiohead songs, and the 2001 film Sexy Beast, which garnered Ben Kingsley an Oscar nomination. He is not afraid of uncomfortable silences, or drawing out shots. He really hangs the opening sequence out to dry. It begins with the title on the screen in white letters over a black background. The letters take a long time to fade to black, then we sit there with a dark screen for a while, while music plays that made me feel like I was in a planetarium, waiting for the show to start. Any longer, and I would have wondered if there was something wrong with the projection. The music that plays over the end credits is an unsettlingly loud cacophony, in a 5/4 time signature, with sounds that resemble screams.

When it comes to the style of the movie, I can best compare it to The Florida Project. That was set in what you might call the darkness on the edge of town – the lowly extended-stay residences right near the most magical place on Earth. You’d only find yourself there if you took a wrong turn or were down on your luck. The Zone of Interest’s focal point is another interesting zone on the outskirts of somewhere significant, and it has the same random, raw, documentary feel of the aforementioned.

The family loves their dream house, that includes a garden, a greenhouse, and a pool. The patriarch has an easy-peasy commute to work. The movie stays on their side of the wall. The viewer is never privy to anything inside the concentration camp, but there is surprisingly mechanical and matter-of-fact dialogue about awful things – such as when some work colleagues are talking about the new efficient system they came up with for how to run the ovens, or the housewives’ conversations about items bid on, that used to belong to the Jewish families. They prattle on about these matters with no regard for their sheer weight. They aren’t too bothered by the pesky smells or screams they might be exposed to at night when it gets quiet. The cast is solid. Between this and Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra Hüller (as the wife) establishes herself as the MVP of multitasking actors from the past six months.

The Zone of Interest successfully accomplishes an eerie juxtaposition between a happy, sunny existence right outside some of the worst torture and death that has ever happened. It takes a tremendous risk by giving us a story set in Auschwitz from a German family’s point of view. You can almost have affection for these characters, if you ever manage to momentarily forget who they work for, and what’s transpiring on the other side of that wall. And now it’s all a museum.

Grade: B+