The Zone of Interest
2023
****½
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Ralph Herforth, Daniel Holzberg, Sascha Maaz, Freya Kreutzkam, Imogen Kogge, Johann Karthaus, Lilli Falk, Nele Ahrensmeier, Luis Noah Witte, Kalman Wilson, Stephanie Petrowitz
The commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss, his wife, and five children live happy and oblivious lives in their idyllic home, which shares a wall with the concentration camp, where thousands of Jews are gassed and burned daily. Can cinema ever capture the immense scale and unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust? Some terrific films have attempted it, namely Son of Saul and Schindler's List, but Jonathan Glazer's harrowing drama never goes inside the camp. The scale of the human suffering and systemic cruelty is conveyed through Johnnie Burn's haunting Oscar winning sound design. This well-acted film is an unrelenting portrait of the banality of evil, a term coined by Hannah Arendt to explain that acts of great evil can be committed by ordinary individuals, not monsters, when they follow orders without critically assessing the moral implications of their actions. Glazer scripted from Martin Amis' 2014 novel. Academy Award winner for best international feature film.
