The Zone Of Interest
The Zone Of Interest [2023]
Starring: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel
Direction by Jonathan Glazer
Language: German
At first glance, I thought this movie would be absolutely brilliant. Movies about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust have often been some of my favourites, as they were tragedies so large and pronounced, with impacts that continue to reverberate into contemporary society. I don’t know what I was expecting from this, to be honest. I usually think that every movie will have a main character who serves as a focal point, but I soon found out that in this movie, that wasn’t the case. It was almost as if the audience is god-like, peering into the lives of what seems like an ordinary European family, expect for that fact that the patriarch is one of the bigwigs at the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which is directly adjacent to the family home.
My first instinct when it came to watching this movie was this: it was chilling, and really highlights the quiet malice behind humans, particularly those in positions of power. This movie is the story of a senior Nazi SS member, who lives with his family in a nice home adjacent to the concentration camp in which he works. The movie explores the family’s schadenfreude: they reap the rewards of Jewish oppression and almost flaunt it by being so close to a concentration camp. Throughout the movie, we can see the ash coming from mass exterminators only several hundred meters away. We can hear the terrified screams of enslaved Jews, and the gunshots used to keep them ‘under control’. The fact that a family with children can live with all this destruction nearby is Glazer’s way of highlighting, as I said before, the malice behind human character. It was almost as if he tried to highlight how people continue to live in a way parallel to the life lead of the family in the movie, even until today. The movie was almost timeless in that sense - those in Germany and Austria live normally, whilst nearby Ukraine continues to be affected by significant conflict.
Whilst it did feel very cool to have an alternative viewing experience, feeling like you were in the movie rather than being a mere observer of a stranger's story, I do think that this movie tread on Holocaust movie tropes a little too much. I really do hate to say this, because film renditions of the Holocaust are important and powerful in their own ways. However, the film did fall into some cliched traps. Firstly, there was the little subplot of the Polish maid sneaking out of her employers' house to hide apples for the Jewish prisoners to eat whilst working. The problem with this plot is that I found it had very, very little to do with the main plot. Someone could say her actions were an example of how the Nazi-aligned family in the movie could control masses of people in concentration camps, but not those in their own house, but that is a stretch to say the least. I feel like the trope of hope in darkness in the Holocaust is severely overdone. It’s alright when it fits into the plot, but it really wasn’t necessary. This was the same later on in the movie: there was a brief flash forward to a Holocaust museum. It was a very strange addition to the movie: it wasn’t needed, again. I feel like the people watching this movie are intelligent, and are fully aware of the tragic effects of the Holocaust. As such, all these scenes emphasizing the effects of the Holocaust were not needed, and quite on the nose. The entire narrative of the movie was having the Holocaust in the background and pointing a finger towards human evil. By bringing the effects to the foreground, the entire narrative the movie was building to lost significance very quickly.
Some questionable decisions were made in the movie for sure, and it is by far not my favourite contender in this year’s award season.
