Cannes Film Festival 2023: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

When speaking of Tobe Hooper‘s horrifying classic of American nihilism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, director John Carpenter stated that, while the film did indeed terrify him, it “pacified [his] soul”. And while Jonathan Glazer‘s fourth feature film is much more comparable to the late works of Kubrick and Roy Andersson than any horror film (though I’m of the opinion that his latest is fairly incomparable to any motion picture ever made), I found The Zone of Interest to have a similar effect on me that Chain Saw seemingly had on Mr. Carpenter.

Calculated Evil

Films based on and concerning the Holocaust are always tentative ideas as it is surprisingly quite easy for filmmakers to exploit or glorify the tragedy and the people involved in such a catastrophe. Glazer boldly avoids these possible exploitive dishonesties by only focusing on the ice-cold characters at the center of the black hole in place of the film’s heart: that being Commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel, best known for his remarkable work in Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon) and his wife, Hedwig (the captivating Sandra Hüller). The film does nothing to humanize these two but rather shows them at more than an arm’s length away in a very calculated “fly-on-the-wall” type manner. In one early scene, Rudolf is blindfolded by his children and led to the backyard as they and their mother have refurbished an old canoe for him. It is a scene of brief domestic happiness that is undercut for the audience by an ungodly cloud of pitch-black smoke looming over their backyard.

Evil is less brunt in this film and a lot more sterile and mundane. Glazer here is showing that these former human beings lived their lives contently in such an unfathomable environment but never tells you why or how they lived this way. Perhaps it’s complete disassociation, perhaps a certain type of ignorance is needed to ignore such atrocities that are going on in your own backyard, atrocities that you yourself and your spouse are keeping mum about and even participating in. This life of yours with the white picket fence and the handsome children and the pretty new things (sometimes things stolen from your oppressed victims) can never truly be an appeasable one when you find jaw fragments in the river down the road or hear the constant sounds of stripping flesh and gunshots. Glazer never shows a single frame of the atrocities committed to these human beings but he is far from ignorant of them. He is showing how truly desensitized these people are to these horrors and how that looming wickedness just beyond their homes seemingly doesn’t make them flinch.

This feeling of desensitization gives the entire film a very sterile feeling, one which is heightened by the impeccable sound design (in one instance, I thought I heard the sounds of children screaming and playing, as was the case in previous scenes, only to realize after focusing on it a little longer than it was the near inhuman sound of a woman being tortured. This sound and moment may stick with me forever) and Mica Levi‘s phenomenally eerie score (it’s not unlike their score for Glazer‘s previous film, Under The Skin, but it never feels like a retread). Łukasz Żal‘s masterfully distant photography helps further fill the viewer’s senses of dread and disassociation as they never quite get close enough to these characters to get any sense of why (there are maybe three close-ups in the entire film) and these almost aseptic images are made all the more powerful by the purposefully jarring editing by Paul Watts that make the film seem as if it has a mind of its own, hard cutting whenever it pleases as if it in and of itself is a force of nature, never to be fully understood no matter how dissected it is.

A Nightmare of Calm

Jonathan Glazer has made a film like no other with The Zone of Interest. This sounds like an easily hyperbolized statement but no other film, at least a recent film, comes to my mind that has such a distinctly barren heart, a film that is so disassociated yet never ignorant to the era and abominations it is depicting. Glazer has seemingly created a new form here, with the help of his ingenious collaborators, and has made one of the darkest nightmares in recent memory but one that’s so subtle in its evil that it will probably seldom be classified that way.

The Zone of Interest is a film that festers in the mind like a disease, a film that is unwilling to give any answers to its subjects’ inhumanity but rather just focuses on their domesticity to show that they often lived just like me or you. To show that the line between the evil and the sane isn’t as blurred a line as we’d like to think it is.

The Zone of Interest currently has no scheduled release date. It will be distributed by A24 and premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. 

Watch The Zone of Interest