This movie gave me the shivers in a big way.
I don't even know how to articulate my thoughts on this film. I didn't really think it was possible to show me a story about the Holocaust that felt like something I hadn't already seen, but Jonathan Glazer manages to do just that with this film. I tried to read the Martin Amis novel this is based on and got almost all the way through it, but I bailed with about 50 or so pages to go. Just couldn't force myself through that last bit. But I read enough of it to know that the film is a very loose adaptation. It's more like Glazer took the general idea and then made his own story out of it.
I had just watched "All the Light We Cannot See" shortly before seeing this film, and I was so irritated in that series that the Nazis were all portrayed as such cartoonish villains. Every single one was a ghoulish monster who monologued while terrorizing whoever they happened to be in the room with. My problem with that is that it makes the Nazis look like aberrations rather than as normal people who were somehow brainwashed into thinking that what they were doing was on the right side of history, so it's easy to dismiss the Holocaust as something that couldn't happen again. But in "The Zone of Interest," Glazer does the exact opposite. The Nazis in this are banal, ordinary people who tend their gardens, bicker about the things spouses bicker about, spend the day bathing in the river with their kids. It just so happens that literally outside their backyard is daily mass murder which they can conveniently ignore because it's out of sight. We hear the screams, gunshots, the trains bringing in fresh batches of people to be slaughtered, but we don't ever see it. The film creates a portrait of the most banal kind of evil, and it's hard for me to get my head around it.
Christian Friedel and Sandra Huller give sensational performances as the commandant of Auschwitz and his pampered, spoiled wife. The film demands full attention from its audience, as frequently the most important thing happening on screen is happening in the background, or up in the far corner of the frame. We'll see a column of crematorium smoke hovering in the distance, or see some hazy ash floating by as the Nazis wander around their flower garden that they're so proud of.
In the film's final moments, we get a glimpse of what might be a conscience in the commandant, a hint that he might not be as utterly indifferent to what he's doing as he appears throughout the rest of the film. It's a haunting scene to cap off a haunting movie.
And can I just say that reading about the making of this film makes it all the more impressive. Everything happening on the other side of the concentration camp wall is visual effects projected onto green screens. Now those are the kinds of special effects that really impress me.
Grade: A.
