Jonathan Glazer’s magnificent The Zone of Interest is the best, most important film of 2023

The Zone of Interest

Directed by: Jonathan Glazer

Written by: Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis

Starring: Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller

Classification: N/A; 105 minutes

Opens in: select theatres Dec. 22

Critic’s Pick

A wife makes tea, a husband listens to the radio, a housekeeper mops the floor, a brother and sister race off to school, and in the background – heard but never seen – men, women and children scream as they are murdered indiscriminately. This is the brutally mundane world of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a deeply chilling and precisely engineered nightmare that is the best and most important film of 2023, our shared year of blind eyes and buried heads.

Loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, Glazer’s film follows the everyday household routines of the Hoss family. Father Rudolf (Christian Friedel) is a mostly devoted family man, ensuring that he excels at work and that his children have everything they should need. Mother Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) stays on top of the home, and is especially proud of her garden, a magnificently cared for patch of soil that blooms with all the many vibrant promises of the earth. The family goes for a picnic, they swim in the nearby river, they celebrate birthdays, they endure minor domestic anxieties (Rudolf’s ongoing affair, Hedwig’s strained relationship with her visiting mother), and they say goodnight to start all over again the next day.

It is all so blandly quotidian. Until you notice the tall grey walls abutting the Hoss estate. And the plumes of dark smoke rising from just beyond. And the gunshots. And the wails – the horribly strained wails – made all the more ghastly as they barely rise above a level of muteness, drowned out by the occasional laughter of children, the barking of the family dog. The white noise of genocide.

It is 1942, and Rudolf Hoss is the SS commandant in charge of Auschwitz, with the concentration camp sitting right in his family’s backyard.

A feature-length meditation on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” – although in execution more about the pernicious selfishness that fuels moral decay – Glazer’s film is a tremendously bold gambit. This is a Holocaust story absent any bodies, or even a brief glimpse of a victim. Any dialogue about the atrocities occurring next door is referenced with a bureaucratic code of euphemisms. The space that the Hoss family put between themselves and Hell is where the film finds its own shock and awe, with Glazer’s camera extraordinarily replicating that existential distance.

But this isn’t a film about the bliss of ignorance. Rudolph, a real-life figure, is shown to take pride in his work, luxuriating in the praise of a superior who commends his “strength in turning theory” – that is, wide-scale murder – “into practice.” He nods along during a meeting of SS higher-ups who discuss the final solution in all but name. He is, to put it as plainly as the film’s deceptively simple visual language, career-minded.

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Hedwig, too, knows exactly how her world works. At one point she boasts to her mother, while trying on a fur coat confiscated from one of the camp’s prisoners, that she is known around town as the “Queen of Auschwitz.” In another moment, she threatens to turn one of her young servant girls “into ash.”

Complicity bleeds further into enthusiasm when Hedwig discovers that Rudolph is being transferred to a more senior SS post, and that the family must move from Auschwitz. Furious, she believes that no one, not even the Führer, can rip her home away from her. Glazer realizes that the dark irony need not be underlined.

Using languorously staged sequences in and around the Hoss estate, amplified by composer Micah Levi’s spare and fantastically haunting score, the filmmaker cautiously and confidently guides us into a wading pool of darkness – we can swim, but never drown. His refusal to go inside the walls of the camp represents a controlled and calculated cinematic cruelty: in the absence of presented images, the audience is forced to conjure our own. Glazer’s complete lack of sentimentality here not only underlines his artistic discipline, but also his tremendous respect for history and the actual ground he walks on. (The film was shot on location, with the production using an abandoned home just outside the camp to recreate the Hoss property.)

The director does permit the tiniest sliver of light to pierce his vision, albeit in the most imaginative and unexpected way. At various points in his film – much of which is shot in daylight, all clear skies and sun-dappled rooms – Glazer cuts away to scenes of a local Polish girl gathering and leaving scraps of food for Auschwitz’s captives. Yet a clear picture of the girl is never revealed, her shape only shown via night-vision thermal imaging, a lone point of warped, multicoloured light shining in the blackened landscape.

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In a film of such formal rigour, performances might seem like tertiary concerns. But Glazer finds committed and uncompromising collaborators in Friedel and Hüller, both of whom deliver fully formed monsters with terrifying ease. Hüller is doubly impressive, given that this holiday season’s moviegoers will have to reconcile her unambiguous work here with the far more slippery skin required of her in Anatomy of a Fall.

As in Glazer’s previous films, each of which twisted genre to his own magnificent will – from the gangster-bloke surrealism of Sexy Beast to the austere sci-fi noir of Under the Skin – The Zone of Interest is a layered thing, containing experiments within experiments.

Toward the film’s finale, the director adds to the production’s audacious conceit by taking one more gigantic risk in a bid to connect the past to the present. To interrogate whether the lessons of history – that no people should be devalued over another – have actually been learned. Without revealing exactly what happens or how Glazer pulls the trick off, the fact that he answers his own narrative dare with a literal gag of nausea is devastatingly perfect.

The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.