The Zone of Interest (Glazer, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

The great Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, whose influence can be seen in moments of Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, has long been interested in the banality of and drudgery of fascist life, to the point that colour often seems to have drained entirely from the diorama-like landscapes his characters inhabit. Indeed, he made a short film not unlike The Zone of Interest, an incredible film called World of Glory, back in 1991. The film begins with as startling and upsetting an image as I can imagine. A group of naked people have been crammed into a truck, screaming, as it is fitted with a pipe attached to the truck’s exhaust. Fully clad people stand by watching, occasionally looking back awkwardly at the screen, and us watching. The truck starts and drives around a circuit for a few minutes, until the screams fall silent. The rest of the film features nothing of the level of horror this sequence contains, but its presence – and the direct connection it makes to the collective cultural memory of Holocaust gassings, haunts the rest of the film, especially as our lead character begins to feel the claws of guilt and shame rip at his soul. World of Glory would make for a brilliant precursor to The Zone of Interest, which screens on Rialto Channel this weekend for the first time since it appeared in cinemas in 2023. The films share many qualities – a sense of remove between us and the subjects, a bold conceptual take on the Holocaust, and striking, intricately conceived imagery. The real difference between them is the tone with which either director approaches the material. As with all of Andersson’s work, there’s a gleeful, nihilistic stroke of absurdist humour that floats through World of Glory. Glazer’s film, meanwhile, is neither cheeky nor aloof in the way Andersson’s work is. It is a harsh, strident thing, like the shock of static at the end of a VHS tape.

I have struggled relentlessly with The Zone of Interest. In all honesty, I am still not entirely sure where I land – the sands beneath my feet shift from day to day on whether I regard the film as an outright success or a fascinating failure. Never before has one of my star ratings been less indicative, sometimes lower than what I feel it should be and sometimes higher. What I can say is that the film is utterly essential – a work that demands to be watched, discussed, and mulled over. It is just the fourth film from Glazer, and a work that represents the British filmmaker’s slow march into the chilly, austere approach that we got a taste of in his last film, Under the Skin, and which now seems to be his defining trait. ‘Clinical’ is a word that carries a certain negative charge, but in the hands of Glazer it’s a term that comes to life, paired with a kind of existential searching. Comparisons to Kubrick, a filmmaker far more emotion-driven than his public perception would suggest, are mostly apt. The Zone of Interest, the winner of the Best International Feature Oscar for this year, represents yet another level of stylistic detachment from the subject. It’s fitting that the film ends in a museum, as much of the film feels like watching through glass. Glazer’s choice of story is Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, one that focuses on the Höss family, who live in a pleasant wartime bourgeois homestead that also happens to be situated directly next to Auschwitz concentration camp, where the family patriarch Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is commandant. The film’s primary mode is the pseudo-dramatic (the film is almost entirely observational, almost anthropologic) contrast these two spaces form by being placed next to each other, one seen and the other only heard, care of the remarkable work of sound designer Johnnie Burn. 

One of the most discussed and dissected films of the young decade, the latest from iconic, mysterious British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer (only his fourth in over 20 years) is another daring milestone in a career quite unlike any other filmmaker. Whatever one takes from the film, it is a work that simply demands to be seen. 

The first time I watched The Zone of Interest, something about the concept with which Glazer approached this story really did not sit well with me. It all comes down to intention – what is it we are meant to draw from the voyeuristic, dispassionate method in which Glazer is regarding this monstrous family so tied to the great wound of the 20th Century? Is it a commentary on such approaches – a style that has garnered so much acclaim in the European art film scene (a film from this strain I thought of often while watching this is the 2018 film Angelo, for example) or simply another one of its ilk? On first watch, I feared the film’s rigorous style approached gimmickry – by drawing the attention of the viewer to the falseness, the constructedness of the film, did Glazer also sap the film of its meaning? I found myself disturbed even by Burn’s layered sound work – how many versions of a scream did he generate to find the one that perfectly captures the last moment of a woman in the camps? 

I rewatched the film for this review, and saw The Zone of Interest in a different way. The way we think of a gimmick usually indicates a sense of cynicism on behalf of the directors. Think of the one-shot-take fad that we as an audience are still not clear of – films like Birdman and The Revenant and 1917 (a film I have a soft spot for, to be fair) who attempt to underline their importance and cinematic bona fides by showcasing just how impressive their approach was, relevance to the story itself be damned. I cannot say that Glazer’s film has an ounce of cynicism, and this watch confirmed to me that The Zone of Interest’s construction is not a gimmick. Other elements, too, clicked into place. The domineering evil of Höss matriarch Hedwig’s (the superb Sandra Hüller) blinkered existence forms the film’s most impactful sequences. Hüller is the closest thing to a ‘name’ the film has (having appeared in Anatomy of a Fall that same year and Toni Erdmann, among others, before that), but she disappears seamlessly into the fabric of Glazer’s conception, which is perhaps why images of her wandering the garden of her house with her baby have become the film’s breakout image, even inspiring memes. One of the most fascinating elements of the film is the way the knowledge of what the family are party to manifests in each member of the family on a subconscious level – Hedwig tries on Holocaust victims’ stolen fur coats away from prying eyes; the children descend into casual retaliative cruelty at the drop of a hat. Burn’s sound design, too, took on another level of significance, counteracting any illusion of domestic bliss, particularly when coupled with Mica Levi’s insistent, jarring score. The ongoing thrum of the furnaces permeates nearly every sequence, not to mention the sounds of dogs, gunshots and screaming. Though little ‘drama’ happens in The Zone of Interest, the disgust and anxiety we feel moves at the same consistency as that thrum.

The key to The Zone of Interest’s power lies in Glazer’s own history. Glazer, the descendent of Ukrainian and Bessarabian Jews who fled pogroms in Europe to come to the United Kingdom, carries the weight of generational persecution and the collective cultural trauma of Jewish existence in the 20th Century. For all its surface dispassion, The Zone of Interest could be read as Glazer’s most personal artistic statement, a work that boldly reconstitutes the horror of history through a modern lens. The film is not a ‘historical’ piece – indeed its construction eschews the limitations of ‘period’ at every turn. No, The Zone of Interest is about the current moment, which is simultaneously commendable and exposing of the film’s limitations. Everything in the film, from its flat digital photography to its ‘hidden camera’ style of observational shooting, its squelching score and the standout sequences of a girl hiding apples for prisoners in ghostly night vision, reminds us that we haven’t been transported back to this time, we are watching that time from the present moment. This is made literal by Glazer’s blunt final sequence, where Rudolf seems to get a glimpse into the future, witnessing the Holocaust museum as it is cleaned and prepared by workers, the totems of horror (mountains of shoes, uniforms, furnaces) watch on from behind the glass, haunting remnants of stolen lives. After he finishes observing, he descends a series of stairs, down into blackness. That we operate in the same space as Höss in that moment doesn’t feel like a coincidence. It feels, to paraphrase Maddie from Euphoria, like this fucking play is about us.

And this is where we arrive at the thorniest and most difficult problem of The Zone of Interest. Glazer’s film is not a museum piece at all, but a challenge. In a time where cultures the world over, from West Papua to the Congo to, of course, Palestine, face genocide and mass death, Glazer draws a direct line between the Hösses and us, the viewers, comfortable in our gardens as untold, unfathomable destruction goes on out of sight, out of mind, in our name and using our tax dollars. It’s an uncomfortable indictment, surely even enraging for some to stomach. The easier thing for a viewer would be to shake their heads at the cruelty and barbarism of an earlier time, and resign the film to history. But Glazer doesn’t want that – look at his Oscar speech, a remarkable thing, if you want further proof. ‘All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.’ It would seem, anecdotally, that few have gleaned this intention, that many see it simply as that aforementioned museum item – a fascinating one, but not one that is talking directly to their own actions. Is it a failure of the film, of the director, that this understanding hasn’t manifested in the viewer? I fear I do not know the answer.

The Zone Of Interest premieres August 31, 8:30pm exclusively on Rialto Channel.

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