The Zone of Interest
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
1h 46m
Midway through Jonathan Glazer’s new movie The Zone of Interest, Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) proudly tells another character that her husband calls her “the Queen of Auschwitz” due to the blissful family life that she has built just outside the camp’s perimeter. Her husband is Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz who coordinated the deaths, in a conservative estimate, of hundreds of thousands of people. In a full theatre, the “Queen of Auschwitz” line provokes uncomfortable laughs from the audience, as do numerous other instances throughout the film – Hedwig’s horror at the thought of having to leave Auschwitz, Rudolf’s annoyed message to other Auschwitz personnel after their carelessness interrupts his leisurely day at the river. That’s not to say that The Zone of Interest entirely ignores the horrors on the other side of the fence. The Höss’s idyllic life is frequently punctuated by gunshots, screams, and other sounds of suffering. However, these lines – and the disconcerted laughter they elicit – exemplify the movie’s ultimate failure to achieve its goal, as Glazer himself put it in an interview with The Guardian, of allowing us to “see ourselves” in the Höss family.
There is no significant narrative drive in The Zone of Interest. Rather, as in his previous film Under the Skin, Glazer and his team shot the film largely using hidden cameras, setting them up and then leaving the actors to perform their scenes. The voyeuristic approach effectively immerses the audience in the everyday activities of the Höss family – Hedwig’s household management and entertaining, the children playing happily, and Rudolf carrying out administrative duties related to the camp’s operations. A film that unflinchingly shows the unapologetic lives of Nazis is intriguing, and the film’s intentionally flat cinematography effectively conveys the hollow underbelly of their lives. However, Glazer does not fully commit to presenting the Höss family’s lives in plain, tedious detail. Instead, he intercuts these scenes with highly stylized sequences, filmed in night vision, of a girl hiding apples to feed the camp prisoners. While the rest of the film is soundtracked only by the ambient noise of the concentration camps, Mica Levi’s score overwhelms these scenes, provoking an epic sense of dread. The suffocating stylization in these sequences, in contrast with the intentional drabness of the rest of the film, lacks a clear purpose other than to impart what the audience, presumably, already knows – that the Holocaust is an overwhelmingly horrifying event. After all, the film relies on our pre-existing knowledge of the Holocaust rather than actually showing these atrocities – a choice that may be admirable if the film was fully committed to this goal. However, though Glazer purportedly resists the trappings of familiar Holocaust narratives, the night vision segments suggest otherwise – rather than truly forcing the audience to sit in discomfort through both the lack of plot and the focus on fully unrepentant Nazis, he shows a heroic figure, the type of character around whom Holocaust movies are typically built. This gives the audience an out – instead of being forced to recognize ourselves in the Höss family due to our lack of alternative, he allows us to identify with this girl, and to tell ourselves that we would be equally valiant in a similar situation.
A lack of commitment to the film’s supposed ambition recurs in Glazer’s depiction of Hedwig’s mother, who comes to visit and is initially in awe at her daughter’s wondrous family life, but leaves shortly thereafter; unlike her daughter, she is unaccustomed to blocking out the noises from over the fence, and finds them unsettling enough to depart without even a goodbye. Glazer gestures here at an internal tension that is generally absent from the film’s other characters – while this may be simply due to the fact that Rudolf and Hedwig do not feel any apprehension over their actions, it does not make for particularly compelling cinema. The only moral tension the film alludes to, beyond that of Hedwig’s mother, is one that Glazer’s script imposes on Rudolf. Towards the end of the film, we see Rudolf, for once, alone, unaccompanied by his subordinates, servants, or family members. He becomes suddenly, violently ill, and Glazer juxtaposes this scene with other footage that suggests that this illness is karmic in nature – a sort of physical retribution for Rudolf’s actions and his legacy, the thorough rottenness of his soul making itself known. Beyond the trite simplicity of this imagery, it again marks a deviation from the intentions of Glazer’s project – rather than merely presenting Rudolf’s life for what it is, Glazer cannot help but to impart a moral judgment, not trusting the viewer to condemn Rudolf’s actions by their own volition. Contrary to Glazer’s goal of achieving a detached point of view, he directs the viewer’s emotions and reactions, even in circumstances where it seems unnecessary or even detrimental to the film’s intended mission.
This brings us back to those lines that prompted uncomfortable laughter in my theatre both times I saw the film. Like the much-derided Picasso line in Titanic, or the early Mad Men scene where Sally Draper plays with a dry cleaning bag over her head, we laugh at the characters’ total lack of self-awareness, at how they can so easily brush off things that we the audience find horrifying. In short, lines like this allow the audience to feel superior, morally or otherwise, to the people whose lives we are viewing – cues that feel wholly unneeded when plainly witnessing Rudolf Höss’s life and actions. In combination with the insertion of the courageous girl and the conflicted grandmother, these moments prevent the audience from being truly immersed in these people’s lives, from being forced to see ourselves in them. Instead, we can call the movie “chilling” and “important,” but leave with our moral superiority intact, confident in our belief that we would fill the role of hero or, at least, of disgusted bystander, rather than that of the callous perpetrator who will be punished – both legally and spiritually – for his crimes.
Rating: 2.5/5
The Zone of Interest is currently playing at Fifth Avenue Cinemas.
Barbie outrage (and other takeaways from the Oscar nominations)
On a very different but related note, nominations were announced last Tuesday for the 96th Academy Awards, with The Zone of Interest picking up five nominations. Despite my very mixed feelings on the movie, I am generally okay with its nominations (with the exception of screenplay) – I can’t deny that it is a great technical achievement, and its exploration of genocide, culpability, and society’s willingness to turn a blind eye is likely resonating with a wide spectrum of voters even more than usual this year.
Of course, the biggest story out of this year’s Oscar nominations is the fact that, though Barbie received eight nominations, Margot Robbie was not nominated for Best Actress and Greta Gerwig was not nominated for Best Director. Personally, I do not see these exclusions as snubs. The nominations this year are some of the strongest in recent memory, and Best Director in particular was highly competitive. Though I don’t love Oppenheimer or The Zone of Interest, I would still place Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Glazer (as well as several other, unnominated directors) above Gerwig in this category – Barbie, to me, is much more an achievement in script than in direction, and Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach did receive a nomination for writing the film. Hollywood’s long-standing history of misogyny certainly plays a role in the fact that only one woman – Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall – was nominated for Best Director this year. I don’t think misogyny played that great of a role in Gerwig’s lack of nomination – Barbie is a big-budget studio comedy, one uncouched in dramatic elements, a type of movie that very, very rarely yields results at the Oscars. Rather, misogyny limits the opportunities that women get to direct movies, and by extension limits the number of women-directed movies that come up in the awards conversation. I have a spreadsheet of nearly 170 notable movies released in 2023, largely from Vulture’s Movie Fantasy League roster, which includes virtually all movies that may have been considered for Oscar nominations. Of these, 36 – or around 20% – were directed or co-directed by women. The Academy’s Best Director nominations, then, are actually perfectly proportionate to the number of women-directed films released last year. The Academy is not without its problems, but ultimately they cannot nominate movies that are not being made in large numbers, and this strikes me as a much greater concern than the exclusion of Greta Gerwig – who already holds an Oscar nomination for Best Director and three nominations for Screenplay, and whose most recent movie brought in well over a billion dollars at the box office.
I cannot fully speak to Margot Robbie’s exclusion, as I , like most of the world, have not yet seen Nyad. It didn’t come as a shock; comedic performances, and particularly comedic leads, are not often recognized by the Academy, and by virtue of Gerwig and Baumbach’s script Gosling had a much flashier role. Many people also do not seem to understand that Robbie and Gosling were in completely different categories, and their performances were being compared to the other lead actresses and supporting actors, respectively, rather than to each other. Academy voters did not feel that Gosling gave a better performance than Robbie, but that he gave a better performance than those supporting actors who did not land a nomination. Far more egregious than Gosling’s nomination is America Ferrera’s inclusion in Best Supporting Actress – a perfectly fine performance, but one that absolutely pales in comparison to many others from last year, such as Julianne Moore in May December and Claire Foy in All of Us Strangers. Ultimately, I agree with the Academy on this one – I don’t feel that either Robbie or Gerwig deserved a nomination any more than those who were nominated in those categories.
I obviously love the Oscars, but they consistently do not reward the best movies of a given year. I accept this and choose to follow them anyway, both because it’s fun and because I like the insights it offers into the perspectives, narratives, and tastes that Hollywood values. This year’s nominations are, again, much better than they have been in recent years, even if my Best Picture lineup would deviate almost entirely from theirs (more on that in a couple weeks). This is a rare year where, in many categories, I would be happy with any of the nominees going home with a trophy, and I’m excited to see how things unfold through the rest of the season.
If you have thoughts on the Oscar nominations, or on The Zone of Interest, I’d love to hear them in the comments!