The Zone of Interest (2023)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Cruel Days

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Jonathan Glazer's first film since his masterful Under the Skin, The Zone of Interest is another Holocaust film, but not one like you've seen before. No horrors or atrocities are directly shown. Instead, the focus is on a Nazi family living near the Auschwitz concentration camps. (The film was shot in Poland and German and Polish languages are spoken.) Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is in charge, and oversees the camp's day-to-day operations. His wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall) busies herself raising their children and tending to a garden, surrounded by a high brick wall, topped with barbed wire; plumes of dark smoke sometimes billow skyward. The film mainly depicts their routines: a family swim in a nearby river, a birthday celebration for Rudolf, some deliveries, some meals, some meetings, etc. One meeting, straightforward as can be, is discussing a design to make the ovens more efficient. We might notice that the servants are actually Jewish prisoners, turned into unpaid slaves, though they are rarely acknowledged. The only major drama occurs when Rudolf's superiors order him to be transferred, and Hedwig refuses to leave the home she's built up. At one point, I was thinking that maybe this could have been a short film, but then I understood that the 105-minute running time is designed to make us feel shock at what we're seeing, and then, eventually, fall into the film's rhythms, to become complacent. And then, hopefully, before the quietly brutal ending, we realize that we've done that. We wake up again. It's a demonstration of just how easily our brains can turn off tragedy, and a lesson that maybe, sometimes, we shouldn't.