★★★★★
A bucolic idyll. A summer’s day spent by the river with family. A walk home through verdant woodland serenely lit by golden sunlight filtering through the canopy. Nature’s cathedral. The sound of a woodpecker drumming a tree trunk somewhere in the distance. Or it machinegun fire? Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a masterclass in transforming the commonplace and everyday activities into the grotesque and the inhuman by virtue of the uniquely unpleasant setting in which they occur: in the grounds and environs around Auschwitz during the Second World War.
The camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), is busy overseeing the expansion of Auschwitz into the most efficient death machine the world has ever seen. As detailed in Gitta Sereny’s extraordinary book on Treblinka and Sorbibor camp leader Franz Stangl, Into that Darkness (1974), Höss too was successful as an administrator of mass-scale, industrialised death because the system – the roundups, the railways, the transports, the timetables – ran like clockwork across occupied Europe. But he equally had to be the right man for the job. These bastards were selected for their dedication and unquestioning obedience to the regime; the postings appealed to their own personal ambitions of climbing up the ladder of the Third Reich. But he was also able to turn human beings into objects. Stangl referred to the occupants – actual human beings – pulling into the train station, to then be whipped and beaten as they ran up what the guards cruelly dubbed the ‘Himmelstrasse’ (Heaven Street), as ‘cargo’. It is in this explicit and important context which provides Glazer’s extraordinary new film with its crucial – and stomach-churning – portrayal of total disassociation.
The Zone of Interest in the main depicts the lives of Höss’s wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children, who have made a fine home at Auschwitz. They tend a lovely garden, they play, they go to school, runs the house using Jewish servants whom she sometimes shouts at and sometimes threatens with the gas chambers, informing one as she eats her breakfast one morning, she could easily have her turned into ashes and spread on a field to help with fertilisation. If Höss was a man out to impress his bosses, was obsessed with perfecting a system, in achieving better ‘productivity’, his wife was living her bourgeois dream as mistress of a house in the country, her husband an ‘important man.’
Glazer’s opus builds its fierce emotive power out of nightmarishly aloof domestic vignettes, allowing the inhumanity, grotesquery, and obscenity to build like a swell, into an anger-inducing pitch recalling scenes in Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary, Shoah (1985), where the casualness of an ex-guard who to took part in atrocities, talking about the most inhuman actions imaginable, makes you want to cry as well as reach through the screen and punch them. The contrast between the Höss family living a perfectly content life with the camps, the gas chambers and the crematoriums a stone’s throw away, just over the garden wall, boggles the mind. But it happened. Not just at Auschwitz, but at all the other locations where concentration camps and death camps were built in Nazi-controlled territory (Auschwitz was uniquely both).
Glazer’s singular and sometimes daringly experimental aesthetic does not require scenes we’ve seen countless times before. But we do hear in snippets, episodes of barbarity unfolding offscreen (the sound design is eerie and haunting, a stroke of creative genius in its own right, as is Mica Levi’s wailing score). Sometimes we see the chimneys – viewable from the garden – burning fierce, the smoke billowing into the grey sky, the panic of the Germans when they realise they are covered – have even swallowed – the ashes of the dead as they fall and drift over the nearby land. We hear yelling, bursts of gunfire and people dying (the screams of what sounds like children wrenched from their mothers is unbearable). Glazer is not out to shock per se, but to offer a creative interpretation of what to most of us is simply unfathomable.
Yet from this horror emerges something like a defiant humanity. Its aim has to aspire to something beyond showing us the darkness, beyond showing us figures of hate. That such a thing can come from its icy depiction of people who were willing and able to disassociate from the truth, who saw themselves proudly as part of the state apparatus, living exemplary lives in the Reich, that they had to get rid of undesirables as a matter of course to build a better world, is remarkable.
It’s hardly news Glazer is a supreme visual stylist, but this is filmmaking on another level entirely. Glazer’s masterwork about the psychological peculiarities of the human mind and accompanying impulses feels like something never before seen on the screen; at least not quite like this.
The Zone of Interest is a hard film to take, for sure, but it’s a formidable artistic statement and achievement, and a Palme d’Or contender.
Still: Provided by Festival de Cannes