✯✯✯✯✯

What does it feel like to stare into the face of evil? In the new film from director Jonathan Glazer (his first since 2013’s Under the Skin), we’re made to witness the events of the Holocaust not through the point of view of those who perished but a family of the perpetrators of one of the most heinous crimes against humanity in history. There are many reasons as to why the approach that Jonathan Glazer takes for making a film like The Zone of Interest would be unique, but perhaps it’s also that numbness that ends up making you feel uneasy. By the end of it all, you can’t help but shake off the feeling that it only hits harder more so today, when traces of fascism still bleed their way into contemporary life, all coming off so ordinarily too.

Adapted from Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest tells a story set during the Holocaust from the point of view of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rather than dwelling on the horrific imagery of the gassing of Jewish people, The Zone of Interest instead shows us a portrait of him and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) simply trying to raise their own family and live an ordinary life despite the circumstances surrounding them, as their new home happens to be so close by Auschwitz. Even though we’re not seeing the atrocities being committed on the screen, it’s hard to really shake off the feeling that something terrible is happening behind the scenes, only making this seemingly ordinary family portrait feel sinister.

Jonathan Glazer makes it evident from first frame to last that he wants this portrait of an ordinary family within the tail end of one of the worst atrocities committed against humankind is a very cold, banal, and often draining one. Every moment that seems so ordinary is not without the afterthought that people are dying, but it’s the feeling of total indifference that ends up making everything so terrifying. With how Glazer creates an aesthetic that’s entirely alienating from a setting that’s so ordinary, it’s hard to watch The Zone of Interest without at the very least thinking back to the fact that it manages to render such an atrocity as an ordinary occurrence in what appears to be an idyllic life. It’s a restrained work, but perhaps that restraint ends up putting images in your mind that can’t be erased.

But how we’re made to peer into the lives of evil can only be attributed to how Glazer looks blankly into the lives of the Höss family akin to a voyeur. Working with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who has also shot Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold War, what Glazer and Żal have created is a highly calculated portrait of evil and how it manifests. I think it’s the fact that everything looks so ordinary, especially as we look into the daily life of the commandant of a concentration camp. It looks so hypnotizing, for every moment that we are made to feel the effect of the nonchalance that people unaffected by the evil surrounding them are exerting upon others. And the fact that Glazer and Żal maintain this coldness from start to finish is what sends chills down the spine, because at a certain point you can’t ignore the fact that something horrible is happening behind this supposedly ordinary family portrait.

The existential horror from watching The Zone of Interest is amped up even further by Mica Levi’s score – who collaborated with Glazer on Under the Skin. Levi’s score might just be the best of their own career, never feeling like it booms right in but it adds to the abject horror of what we’re not seeing. But it also adds a very haunting quality to the imagery, especially when you feel the sting. For me, I think that you feel the impact when the images that Glazer shows on the screen establish a sense of disconnect between the people we’re watching and the horrifying reality that surrounds them. However, it also creates a sense of intimacy with the perpetrator, especially as they do menial tasks like any regular person would. What you’ll see is a film that makes you feel like you’re a part of them, and it becomes hard to shake off that feeling the more it goes.

Some may describe Jonathan Glazer as a filmmaker who is completely detached from any sense of human feeling, especially after Under the Skin. It still results in what may very well be one of the most innately terrifying films of the past few years, because Jonathan Glazer senses that pure indifference to the world around themselves will only birth a new rise to a movement akin to Nazism of the day. For me, that’s the most horrifying aspect to think about in The Zone of Interest, because the indifference and the feeling to continually move on without acknowledging the horrors going on around oneself. But for the same reason you can’t watch this without picturing the horrors happening around them, you can’t look away from it – and it’s one of the year’s best films.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via A24.

Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
Produced by James Wilson, Ewa Puszcyńska
Starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel
Running Time: 106 minutes
Release Date: December 8, 2023