A Holocaust movie in the way a skull MRI is a mugshot, Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest is a tribulation of evasion and restraint — in the best ways possible. As you watch this sinister, elusive thing, suffering its moral distance as if you’re holding your breath underwater, you feel every media representation of the Holocaust — every simplified conclusion and revulsed platitude — dissolve into goo. Adapted from the comparatively farcical novel by Martin Amis, Glazer’s movie is an aloof challenge, insisting in its horrifying coolness that you have your own subjective experience with it. What you take away is largely contingent on who you are.
Most of us know enough about the Holocaust, specifically, Auschwitz, to let Glazer’s strategy do a job on us, in a calm cataract of brutal details that never comes close to being explicit. (An uninformed or duped viewer who knows or believes little about the history would be mystified.) Whereas Amis’s book, because it’s an Amis book, fictionalizes and pulpifies the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, conjuring up a web of marital suspicions and murder plots, Glazer largely sticks to the documented facts, weaving a web of mundanity that is only occasionally spiked by the wispy trace of atrocity. Conjured with fastidious precision, the comfortable-posh home of Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), is a happy, self-satisfied bustle of children, servants, thriving gardens, birthday parties, family feasts, contented bedtimes and gossipy visitors — all of it nestled right up against the death camp’s outer wall, with the familiar watchtowers and billowing smokestacks looming in the background against a relentlessly beautiful blue sky. Glazer shoots in wide shot, mostly letting his compositions do the screaming; virtually every scene of familial hubbub and middle-class luxury is framed by the walls of the camp, beyond which, in Johnnie Burn’s insidious sound…
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