Director Jonathan Glazer has become “appointment movie” watching for cinephiles. In a similar fashion to Todd Field last year with Tar, Glazer is returning with his first film in a decade – The Zone of Interest. With such acclaim and adoration for his previous film, the experimental Under the Skin, there was little doubt that his follow-up would be an essential piece of cinema in 2023. Cinephiles got a piece of art set to be in the stratosphere of film and historical conversations for years to come.
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is one of 2023’s crowning achievements. It is a haunting examination of evil that, while often quiet, its messaging and themes remain loud and poignant as Glazer challenges cinephiles to paint the picture individually. It is a sickening reminder of the complicity in which evil can run rampant.
Based on Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest follows the Höss family. The film follows the everyday lives of Rudolf, a commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, his wife, Hedwig, and their children. Glazer’s film brings you into a world of familial events, such as the family gardening while atrocities occur on the other side of a wall, from a day in the lake to conversations around the kitchen table.
Director/writer Jonathan Glazer’s screenplay asks a lot of its audience. Rather than structuring the film in a traditional sense, Glazer creates an atmospheric piece of art that views evil in its most simplistic form.
As the 100-minute film weaves through the banality of life, it becomes crystal clear through Glazer’s lens that one of the film’s most gut-wrenching truths is that the Höss family is just like you and me: a family who celebrate birthdays, reads bedtime stories, and enjoy outings as a familial unit.
The most effective trait of the screenplay is that it allows the audience to paint the picture themselves. Never are we taken into the camps, but rather we hear gunshots constantly in the background. The smoke is always in the sky. Conversations are had, and trains come and go, which, after decades of these stories being told, is an effective storytelling tool as it lends itself as a gruesome reminder of the evil that occurred.
With impeccable sound design and Mica Levi’s mesmerizing score, Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel are haunting. While Friedel’s Rudolf knows that he’s nothing short of a middleman, he is aware that he has a job and, knowing the evil of his actions, attempts to execute it to its awful expectations.
Hüller continues her banner year pairing this with her incredible performance in Anatomy of a Fall, which offers two of the year’s most unique and distinct performances. Hüller’s Hedwig is obsessed with clout and stature as she maneuvers through conversations and actions, aware of her status and threatened by any challenge of that status. In any other film, these two would be seen as a career-driven “power couple,” but The Zone of Interest is not just any film; these two are the personification of evil.
Jonathan Glazer conjured a stunning and uncompromising abstract look at evil. With one of the best-directed and impactful films of the year, The Zone of Interest is a successful experiment set to linger in our minds for a long while.
