The Zone of Interest
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Essay by Todd Field
It begins in birdsong. A summer idyll. The plucking of wild strawberries, bathing in a lazy river, a family picnic with the bucolic beauty and old-world charm of a Carl Larsson painting.
Paradise.
The etymological origin of the word is “walled garden.” And this is where we find ourselves in Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary film “The Zone of Interest.” Within that wall you will smell, taste and, most importantly, see and hear what it contains.
In just 10 minutes, Glazer achieves what one could argue is the most chilling cinematic depiction of the Holocaust ever committed to film — through the simple act of Hedwig Höss applying another woman’s lipstick. A woman we will never meet, yet whose absence is stomach-turning to the extreme.
The thief, and Frau Höss as played by Sandra Hüller supplies new meaning to the word, lives in a house whose guestbook glows with reviews dutifully read aloud by children following their parents’ goosesteps.
But Glazer doesn’t point or give us signposts, he simply adopts us into the family where we take up residence in the most quotidian and intimate manner.
The experience is naked, and he trusts we will pay attention much in the way a child listens to their parents from the backseat of a car. And while Glazer’s use of sound is masterful, so is his eye, the way it forces us to see the world through the Höss family’s, ultimately making us complicit when what we really want to do is scream at the screen.
Stop. Please God, make them stop.
For those familiar with Glazer’s films, it’s no surprise his approach here is unencumbered by tropes, genre conceits, or the cinematic shorthand we often take for granted.
Over his twenty-four-year career as one of our finest filmmakers, Glazer has consistently executed high-wire interpretations of genre, and in the process completely reinvented them: crime (“Sexy Beast”), the paranormal (“Birth”), science fiction (“Under the Skin”).
His pictures within these frames are mind-blowingly unique, as if he’d never seen anything that had been done before.
The Zone of Interest is just as enigmatic and urgent.
We live in a time fraught with all kinds of walls used to ghettoize the other. A paradise from which it feels harder and harder to escape.
Glazer’s art drives us to a place where we have no choice but to try.
