The very unprolific Jonathan Glazer makes his return to cinema—and, shockingly, his Cannes debut—with The Zone of Interest. An Auschwitz drama in German sounds like the farthest thing from his last film, the critically acclaimed, English-language sci-fi horror Under the Skin, but Glazer has never been a director to repeat himself. The Zone of Interest proves well worth the nine-year wait, as Glazer presents the evil of Auschwitz in more ways than one—not only presenting it unflinchingly, but also placing it well in the present.
The Zone of Interest is loosely based on an eponymous novel by Martin Amis, who unfortunately passed away one mere day after the film made its premiere. Auschwitz commandant Höß lives with his family right next to the notorious concentration camp, and he leaves household matters to his wife Hedwig. They decorate their living quarters and mind their daily quotidian business, while smoke fumes and flames few feet away remind us of one of the greatest atrocities in human history.
That’s it, that’s basically the entire movie. Glazer continues his minimalist style in The Zone of Interest, as the film basically repeats one central device again and again: Höß’s family occupies the foreground, while the smoke and flames in the background steal our glimpses. Who cares about repetition when it stays guttingly effective? Glazer makes expert use of the z-axis depth of the frame to hint at violence, and whenever the evidence creeps to the surface, he cuts away. The visual presentation lives in ignorance not only because Höß’s family does, but also because Glazer knows the power of suggestion is stronger than that of exhibition. The movie appears to have nothing but scenes of gardening and cleaning, so when Glazer escalates it tenfold before you know it, the effect is the most disturbing. The pacing is steady but not slow enough to be slow cinema, so Glazer never lets us lose ourselves in the picturesque gardens and the house parties of the Hösses, always keeping us on the edge of discomfort.
A movie with a premise like this obviously has the danger of humanizing monsters; even the slightest attempt at humanization would be immediately objectionable. Under Glazer’s deft control, however, that is never a problem; whenever Glazer appears to inch towards that direction, he quickly shuts it down by a gobsmacking reminder of these people’s mass-murdering ways. Glazer enriches the film with that tension, yet never loses control for even a frame. He also never allows us to even get close to the characters; the stark framing envelops the characters with the darkness of their deeds, and Glazer covers the most mundane of conversations in faraway French overs, using the distance to emphasize the characters’ inhumanity.
War might be the most tired of movie genres and topics; whenever a filmmaker attempts WWII, we know it’s their Oscar-hunting moment. Originality shouldn’t be a requisite for quality, but when Glazer truly finds new ways to depict the Holocaust, it feels like a stunning achievement. Glazer places the Holocaust in the new—the now. As opposed to a vintage, celluloid look that distances us from history, The Zone of Interest looks searingly present. The digital cinematography pops with hyper-saturated colors, and when paired with period-accurate furniture, looks like WWII footage shot in color. Glazer burns the screen with contemporariness as neofascism continues to rise worldwide. And when the movie shifts locations to more palatial architecture from the 20th century, a shocking shift in the coda does the most with the least. Like Quo Vadis, Aida?’s stunning final reel, The Zone of Interest evokes the immense power of most Holocaust museums because it practically is one.
The sudden shift in the coda is one of many ways The Zone of Interest often appears like the projectionist messed up and is playing the reels out of order. Another one is the movie’s beginning, a minutes-long overture straight out of mid-century Hollywood epics like Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The difference is, instead of a full orchestra, we get haunting, distorted, dissonant synths courtesy of Mica Levi. Glazer’s reliance on Levi’s score is much less here than that in Under the Skin, but Levi’s brief appearances remain effective, especially in combination with the sound design. Where does sound design end and score begin? The Zone of Interest blurs the line, as a foreboding, pervasive bass begins out of diegesis, until its horrifying source is revealed.
A few shots of The Zone of Interest even question the relationship between us and spectacle, interrogating why we’re so obsessed with reliving the Holocaust in cinema when we know the basis is a few million people getting mercilessly slaughtered. The argument isn’t fully there, but perhaps also suggests deeper layers of the film I haven’t yet uncovered. But even the surface level is enough to substantiate the film, and this is no pretentious, subtle, opaque movie—Glazer makes sure we get the point and get it fully.