TIFF 2023 Film Review: The Zone of Interest

JONATHAN GLAZER STUNS WITH THE HORRIFICALLY RESTRAINED THE ZONE OF INTEREST

My coverage of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival begins with possibly the most horrifying — and masterful — film of 2023. A picturesque idyll conjured by history’s most monstrous as hell seeps around all its corners, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a haymaker display of a filmmaker’s restraint and precision — a masterwork in a career full of them. Minor spoilers ahead…

A greying, retired gangster fettered by his violent past, an extraterrestrial succubus seized by an earthly loneliness, a widow possessed by the idea that her dead husband has returned as a ten-year-old boy: Jonathan Glazer is a filmmaker who traffics in metaphorical prisons through his bracing filmography, offering glimpses of the human condition via his dark, twisted confines. His latest film, The Zone of Interest, is a meticulous construction of a new kind of cage: one for its audience. A lush domesticity juxtaposed with the greatest atrocities ever committed by mankind, Glazer’s Cannes Grand Prix winner maximizes a gaze at mundane evil through uncanny restraint. More a searing work of anthropology than a traditional narrative, to call The Zone of Interest a Holocaust “drama” would be a misnomer.

Reconfigured from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, Glazer’s vision transplants real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) in the place of Amis’ fictional stand-ins. Granted a pristine parcel of land right next door to the concentration camp, the couple and their blonde-haired, blue-eyed children strive for a portrait of rural bliss: an elegant house, a garden to tend to, and a picturesque river are all part of their manufactured idyll. Just feet away? The too-short brick walls dividing the Höss property from the horrors of Auschwitz itself. Beaming with pride, Hedwig gives her mother a tour: “The Jews are just over the wall,” she relays with a chilling nonchalance. “We planted more vines in the back to grow and cover it.”

“More a searing work of anthropology than a traditional narrative, to call The Zone of Interest a Holocaust ‘drama’ would be a misnomer.”

The Zone of Interest, at its center, is a work of extraordinary strictness: its rigor the source of a debilitating power. Completely devoid of shock-and-awe “girl in the red coat” moments, Glazer’s clinical, locked-down compositions gravitate towards the banal. The Zone of Interest is plainly uninterested in singular displays of Nazi horror, or displays of it at all. Its acts of evil - oozing on the periphery of domestic rigamarole - are designed to needle and splinter in the brain rather than suck the air out of the room: ashes of the dead in the river as nuisance, installing Auschwitz ovens like they’re dishwashers, gunshots and wails of anguish heard but not seen, even its Nazi patter adheres to the euphemistic German “Sprachregelung.” The Zone of Interest is scarier than any horror movie; Glazer conjures a prison of illusory obliviousness and never once is tempted to peek over its squat walls. The effect is immense.

Jonathan Glazer hasn’t made a feature-length film since 2013’s sublime alien stalker yarn Under the Skin - which also explored the craquelure within our empathies - but the director remains as dialed-in as ever with his precise, formal prowess. Shot by Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal, The Zone of Interest employs fixed wide angles across ten stationary cameras within Chris Oddy’s reconstruction of the Höss residence. Bathed in consistent, diagetic light, Glazer’s vision maintains its cold, observational remove from a family wading in nefarious contradiction, even further from the atrocities just over the wall. A vice grip of discipline separates the audience from the tangibility of genocide, but therein lies the gobsmacking paradox of The Zone of Interest: its suffocating, uncomfortable distance makes the horror unignorable.

“Glazer conjures a prison of illusory obliviousness and never once is tempted to peek over its squat walls. The effect is immense.”

There will be much nodding at The Zone of Interest’s depiction of its Arendt-esque “banality of evil,” but it wouldn’t be a Glazer film if it didn’t extend beyond formal commitment to the bit. Reuniting with Under the Skin collaborator Mica Levi, Glazer peppers Zone with discordant, droning soundscapes that collide with the movie’s images, appropriately stinging most when the film - on two gut-wrenching occasions - departs from its fascist terrarium. In one, thermal negatives depict a young girl furtively leaving food for the Jewish laborers in Auschwitz; the other - which shouldn’t be spoiled - is a third act stroke of astonishing artistry, jaunting from the past into…well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

In the film’s press notes, Glazer gleans from philosopher and writer Gillian Jones to imagine “a film that could make us feel ‘unsafe,’ by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think.” The Zone of Interest’s greatest strength is that it broaches urgency and topicality while still feeling major: a crushing depiction of the mundane cogs that comprise of the greatest evils. After almost a decade away from feature-lengths, Jonathan Glazer has returned with a masterwork; a torch to complicity through pointed austerity, The Zone of Interest is another knotty triumph in a career full of them.

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