{"id":44261,"date":"2023-10-08T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-08T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/08\/the-chilling-distance-of-the-zone-of-interest\/"},"modified":"2023-10-08T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-08T13:00:00","slug":"the-chilling-distance-of-the-zone-of-interest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/08\/the-chilling-distance-of-the-zone-of-interest\/","title":{"rendered":"The chilling distance of The Zone of Interest"},"content":{"rendered":"


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During World War II, the Germans designated the area surrounding Auschwitz the \u201czone of interest.\u201d The dullness of the phrase was intentional, another euphemism as operative as \u201cconcentration camp.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Jonathan Glazer\u2019s sorta adaptation of Martin Amis\u2019 eponymous novel, this self-delusion is on display. Hedwig H\u00f6ss (Sandra H\u00fcller) runs a stately home. She raises her children, bosses maids around, and tends to the garden. Their house is on a plot beside Auschwitz. Jews are being slaughtered on the other side of the wall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whereas Amis\u2019 novel fictionalized its characters, Glazer centers it on the real-life Rudolf H\u00f6ss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the camp and a rising star in the Nazi party. A powerful and frightening early scene finds him discussing the specifics of an incinerator and how its chambers can be organized. Mass extermination, project managed. \u201cBurn, cool, unload, reload,\u201d someone explains so casually that they could be talking about buying a refrigerator.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zone of Interest<\/em> isn\u2019t a funny movie, but you will spend a lot of time rolling your eyes at Nazis<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Auschwitz is a pastoral beauty. Mass murder is happening just out of frame. The evidence of it \u2014 the occasional crackle of gunfire, the rising plumes of smoke, the screams \u2014 are easily ignored by the H\u00f6ss family. It\u2019s just ambient detritus, a minor blemish on an idyllic landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s not a lot here in terms of a conventional plot, but the most dramatic conflict for the H\u00f6sses occurs after Rudolf is ordered to transfer to a different city. (The office rewards hard work with a promotion.) Hedwig wants to stay. \u201cThey\u2019d have to drag me out here,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re living as we dreamed we would.\u201d Later, she refers to herself as the Queen of Auschwitz. Zone of Interest<\/em> isn\u2019t a funny movie, but you will spend a lot of time rolling your eyes at Nazis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I did crave the moments of black comedy from Glazer\u2019s previous work. In the underrated 2004 film Birth<\/em>, Nicole Kidman encounters a 10-year-old boy who may or may not be inhabited by the spirit of her deceased husband. (A hilarious conceit!) With his 2012 masterpiece Under the Skin<\/em><\/a>, Scarlett Johansson\u2019s charisma is swapped for a chilly distance as she seduces strangers and submerges them in black ooze. (She\u2019s an alien with unclear motives, though they seem beside the point anyway.) It\u2019s a film rife with innovations \u2014 not just the inspired casting of Johansson but also that Glazer filmed the pickup scenes with hidden cameras, capturing one of Hollywood\u2019s most recognizable stars flirting with real-life, unsuspecting Scots. (Surprisingly, in a fur coat and dark wig, few people seem to identify her.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Like Under the Skin<\/em>, Glazer\u2019s camera work here is meticulous and moody, aided by the careful eye of cinematographer \u0141ukasz \u017bal, best known for his stunning work with Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida<\/em>, Cold War<\/em>). The camera stays distant from its characters \u2014 I can\u2019t recall a single close-up of a face. The effect is a kind of remove, perhaps one that mirrors the detachment they have from their immediate surroundings. Like the script, it\u2019s a look that is stark and spare: the bucolic forests feel just too brightly lit, almost to be washed out; the interiors feel cold and angular.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But mostly, the burden of expectation weighs heavily on a filmmaker of Glazer\u2019s talents, especially as one who releases something every decade. And don\u2019t get me wrong, this movie is remarkable, even if its strongest achievements sometimes feel like technical ones. Very few films of the past decade have been this haunting or sobering.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, it\u2019s hard to know what, exactly, we\u2019re supposed to learn here. For all of Glazer\u2019s formal inventiveness, the ideas central to Zone of Interest<\/em> are familiar. The Nazis are cruel autocrats; the atrocities resonate generations later. Even if the desire for an original narrative about the Holocaust is a fruitless one, it\u2019s hard not to wish that the film\u2019s tensions were more strongly animated. Nothing in the film deepens the themes that it opens with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Partly, I was soured by one trick Glazer pulls at the end \u2014 a brief jump to present-day Auschwitz \u2014 to signal the enduring horror of what has been kept from the viewer throughout the film. It\u2019s a meta-textual gesture toward the movie\u2019s production, which was shot on location, but it\u2019s hard not to see the move as a little obvious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Maybe it\u2019s not too much of a leap to broaden out the specificity of Zone of Interest<\/em>. We go about our lives focused on the domestic rhythms and the narrow-minded ambitions of the workplace, even as many abominable things happen in the world. Glazer\u2019s film is an effective Holocaust movie, but I wonder if there\u2019s a subtler suggestion that we might recognize how small our lives are if we\u2019d just be bothered to peek over the wall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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During World War II, the Germans designated the area surrounding Auschwitz the \u201czone of interest.\u201d The dullness of the phrase was intentional, another euphemism as operative as \u201cconcentration camp.\u201d In Jonathan Glazer\u2019s sorta adaptation of Martin Amis\u2019 eponymous novel, this self-delusion is on display. Hedwig H\u00f6ss (Sandra H\u00fcller) runs a stately home. She raises her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-44261","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}