TEXAS, USA — I wouldn’t say Jonathan Glazer is welcoming us to his latest film “The Zone of Interest” as we watch that title fade eerily and slowly into the surrounding black over the course of what feels like several minutes; welcoming implies a joy or uplift that no single frame of this movie contains. But it does nonetheless feel like we’re entering something—or, perhaps more accurately, descending into a cinematic state of mind fitting for a title card that calls to mind the image of a cigarette burn staining metaphorical pages documenting a dark time in the history of man.
Fading, but never entirely disappearing. And make no mistake: “The Zone of Interest" – nominated for Best Picture, Best International Feature, Best Sound, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at this year's Academy Awards – isn’t a movie that disappears easily from the mind. Its urgency, its historical severity is omnipresent in the plumes of smoke that rise and the screams of terror that ring over the idyllic life a family is building for itself just outside the walls of Auschwitz, where the household patriarch serves as Nazi commander and the sound of gunshots are so commonplace that Rudolf Höss’ children weave them into playtime pleasantries. When a team of Hitler’s ghouls instructs Rudolf on how to use their latest death trap, it’s with the same matter-of-factness your doctor uses when prescribing medication. “Could their attitude really have been so frighteningly calm?” you might ask yourself here and at other points. Could the toll of the Holocaust have ever reached the levels it did if they weren’t?
The overarching idea here may be straightforward: The most evil people won’t, perhaps can’t, see the evil they’re perpetuating. But like so many instances in history where visuals have provided horrific and horrifically vital new dimension to villainy, “The Zone of Interest” turns the act of observing the Hösses into an experience as coldly elegant as it is stark in its portrayal of a family living on the precipice of hell. The movie’s very first scene shows them enjoying a riverside picnic while splashing around in the water, so clearly they don’t mind the heat. They dream and act and look like any other family, and it’s in their complete inability to reckon with how they’re not that glues us to our seat. An unnecessary change of setting in the movie’s third act briefly muddles this elemental nature that proves integral to “The Zone of Interest”—perhaps Glazer felt he needed broaden the movie’s horizons to make up for an absent evolution of feeling, seeing as things begin in the tar pits of human conscience and stay there. But it also sets the stage for a formally awe-inspiring glimpse into a mind that has cut itself off from that thing you or I would call empathy.
Some may take issue with “The Zone of Interest’s” deeply experimental nature, the fact that there’s no traditional plot to speak of; no real character development to trace; no apparent dynamism in cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s shot selection. But this is a film about one of the worst human atrocities ever committed, and if “Schindler’s List” used the tools of broad-sweep Hollywood creativity to open audience’s eyes to Holocaust horrors, Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” walks a path more alien, more unsettling, more in line with the contradiction the Hösses are at peace with personifying in order to settle into the unimaginable circumstances they call home. There’s a soul-pulverizing effect that even dubious viewers are likely to experience out of the movie’s spare craft, though that isn’t the same as calling “The Zone of Interest” sparse. The distinction is integral to what Glazer and his collaborators accomplish—it’s in the convergence of unimaginable evil and the movie’s obvious-seeming lens that “The Zone of Interest” underscores how easily we can play blind to what is happening around us.
Considering the subject matter, that’s a mighty big psychological chasm for a movie of such modest length to make sense of (“The Zone of Interest” runs 105 minutes, compared to the 3-hour-15-minute “Schindler’s List” and Alain Resnais’ haunting 32-minute documentary short “Night and Fog”). But even the runtime, fascinatingly, plays into Glazer’s approach to telling a story in which humanity – the same kind of humanity that this medium has for a century worked to conjure through the interplay of sight and sound and light – is a complete non-factor.
So it fits that “The Zone of Interest” is largely told in static camera shots. It’s appropriate that the apocalyptic belches of Mica Levi’s droning score embellish the already-unforgettable sound design. It makes a primal sort of sense that Rudolf and his wife's bedroom, at one point bathed in ghastly red light, fashions them into an audience of the way history will remember them. And it explains why, in this project that is a sort of anti-movie, Glazer reinforces how the medium can make us aware that history’s darkest passages don’t always definitively live in the rear-view mirror.
