Nathan Weinbender reviews "The Zone of Interest"

NATHAN WEINBENDER:

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is the sort of film for which the word “dispassionate” was invented. It is a movie that observes, sometimes from a clinical remove, domestic scenes that would be unremarkable were it not for the atrocities unfolding just beyond the frame.

It's set in the early 1940s and concerns itself with the daily routines of a well-to-do German family living in a cozy house in the Polish countryside. In their backyard is a concrete wall topped with barbed wire. On the other side of that wall are the Auschwitz death camps.

This is the home of Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz and a high-ranking SS officer, and his wife Hedwig (played by Sandra Hüller, currently Oscar nominated for Anatomy of a Fall). Rudolf’s primary concerns are his standings in the Nazi party, and that his soldiers are trampling the lilac bushes around the camp. Hedwig pays her husband no mind, as long as he keeps his job so she can keep up with her lifestyle.

Inside the house, sun floods through the windows. Children run around. There’s a spacious backyard and a garden and a greenhouse. Visitors arrive and remark on the beauty of the garden. And then we hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire and screams in the distance. The Polish man who works on the property washes the commandant’s boots and blood pools in the basin. The family goes for a swim in a nearby stream and has to run to shore as burnt human remains cloud the waters. At night, the skies turn orange with the fires belching from the neighboring smokestacks, and everyone hurries to shut the windows because of the smell.

The film, which is loosely based on a novel by Martin Amis, never actually shows us the horrors of the death camps. It only occasionally ventures beyond the walls of the Höss compound. Glazer and his cinematographer Lukasz Zal have adopted an exacting, mostly static visual style. The characters are often seen in the middle distance. There are times when it seems like we’re watching closed-circuit footage from hidden cameras, with the film clicking from one stationary angle to another. There are interludes following a young girl in the night, shot in silvery, ghostly infrared photography.

The score by Mica Levi is just as effective. The film begins with a musical overture of sorts: a rumbling, intensifying drone over a blank screen which ultimately gives way to the chirping of birds, which seem to flit around us on the theater’s surround sound. It envelops us in the mood of the film before we’ve seen a single frame.

Some may balk at Glazer’s approach, or interpret it as a diminishment of the horrors. But by putting them in the literal background, Glazer is pushing the malevolence of the orchestrators into the foreground. They carry on with their chores and their parties and their affairs, and the mundanity of it all throws their callousness into even sharper relief. It’s not enough that they live next door to a death camp, but they live well, and that’s something we can’t forget. The Zone of Interest is a meticulously made movie about a meticulous kind of evil.

For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.

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Nathan Weinbender is one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.