‘The Zone Of Interest’: Cannes Review

Dir. Jonathan Glazer. US, UK, Poland. 2023. 107mins

Creating fiction works about the Holocaust may be the most challenging task in cinema – the art form’s Unholy Grail, as it were – and many film-makers have blundered into the field armed with sentiment rather than intellectual seriousness. One of a tiny handful of remarkable exceptions is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. British director Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin) has a reputation as a stylist but, while his new film is certainly stylised, its portrait of Nazi domesticity in the shadow of the Auschwitz chimneys is executed with an objective, chilly control that eschews false rhetoric, leaving maximum space for the audience’s imaginative and emotional response.

Essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion

As serious, daring, and artistically innovative a response to the Shoah as Laszlo Nemes’s very different Son of Saul, The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond. Winning the Grand Prix at Cannes will help it travel.

Shot on location in Poland, the film is ostensibly based on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest – the title referring to the ’Interessengebiet’, the official appellation for the area around the Auschwitz camp. But, just as Glazer reconfigured Michel Faber’s novel for his Under the Skin, this film also bears tangential relation to the Amis book, stripping away its multiple intrigues and sardonic black humour for a minimalist and more strictly severe focus on its central topic.

That topic is the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who have created a cosily luxurious home for themselves and their children at the very edge of Auschwitz. The film reveals the nature of their idyll gradually: at first, we see a composed, painterly shot of the couple and their five children by a lush riverbank, on a swimming trip. It’s only when they return home that we notice the indicators of who they are, and where: Höss’s SS uniform, the household servants who come and go (some clearly camp prisoners), eventually the watchtowers and chimneys outside the family’s supposedly Edenic domain.

For the most part, the film – with Lukasz Zal’s detached, geometrically composed shots sometimes recalling the hard-edged rigour of Michael Haneke – offers a fragmentary evocation of everyday life in the Höss home. The children play, Rudolf reads bedtime stories to his daughters, the family enjoy their swimming pool, Hedwig tends her flowers and proudly shows off her ‘paradise garden’ to her visiting mother (Imogen Kogge). By and by, more sombre elements emerge – although, from the start, the darkness is always all the more evident as the reverse side to the quasi-suburban ‘normality’ on display.

Höss, for example, takes a meeting with some business-like designers of a new crematorium, and Hedwig hands out samples of lingerie clearly taken from newly arrived prisoners. The film constantly addresses our awareness of what we know about the Holocaust, without having to tell or show us too much. If anything, it is even stricter than Son of Saul in refusing to show us the unshowable and unthinkable, which remains offscreem; behind the camp walls or, in one shot, out of view while we look at Höss’s silhouette against a white sky.

Yet Johnnie Burn’s extraordinary deep-textured sound design always makes us aware – sometimes near-subliminally – of violence and slaughter out of sight, mixing gunshots, distant screams and shouts, the subsonic hum of death’s machinery. The barrier between what is seen and not seen, between what is heard and what is silenced by the denying mind, becomes a figure for the Nazi mindset, with the atrocities of the camp system always in full view. Those who are complicit with them contrive to at once know and not know what is being done in their name. Hedwig, of course, is more than complicit, and is presented as an out-and-out monster of entitlement – taking out her anger on her servants (casually threatening one with all too plausible summary execution), and raging at Rudolf when she learns that he is to be transferred to Berlin, outraged at the thought of losing her dream home.

Most of the film is comprised of brief, episodic moments from the Höss home life, with Chris Oddy’s meticulous production design covering every corner of their oppressively neat, labyrinthine living space (’Lebensraum’, to use the ideological Nazi term). The film disorientingly heads in another direction for its final stretch, showing Höss in Berlin’s corridors of power, involved in the grimly mundane bureaucratic administration of deportment and extermination. But final enigmatic shots of him amid austere marble corridors are a further telling prompt to the viewer’s interpretative judgement – together with a hint that, as in Joshua Oppenheimer’s Indonesian death squad documentary The Act of Killing, the murderer’s body must finally speak its guilt. 

Bold stylistic touches emerge from time to time, notably the prelude in pitch darkness, and black and white sequences in negative that seem ostensibly to depict the fairy-tale nightmares of the couple’s young daughter. Mica Levi’s intermittent score is spare and troubling, from low, almost gastric-sounding rhythmic explosions to the keening chorus that concludes the film. Zal’s often forensically detached photography tends to keep us at one remove from the players, which means that this is not conventionally an actors’ film; and yet its leads are extraordinary.

Sandra Hüller’s stolid physical bearing, with a business-like stomp as she walks, chimes tartly with the petulance and fussiness of Hedwig as consummate bourgeois hausfrau, while the callow, delicate looks of Christian Friedel (from TV series Babylon Berlin and Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou) make Höss a strikingly insipid figure, like a boy dressed up to play in SS regalia. Rather than conventionally bringing the Höss couple to life as fully fleshed characters, the film makes us aware of them as people acting out roles within the universe of Nazi protocol, at once morally diseased humans and ghosts within a vast murderous machine.