The Zone of Interest: Movie Review

Cast: Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Loosely based on Martin Amis' 2014 novel of the same name, Under The Skin director Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest is more a film about atmosphere and horror than any driven plot.

It's also a film of extreme dissociation which is evocative and terrifying in equal measure as the entirely mundane plays out.

Friedel and Huller play Rudolph and Hedwig Höss, who live in the house behind Auschwitz. Rudolph runs the camp and is concerned with efficiencies, whereas Hedwig is more concerned with making a life for their children and tending to the garden.

Both seem disconnected with the daily horrors that emerge from nearby, with Hedwig even revealing they're living their dream life and revelling in her title as "Queen of Auschwitz".

There's little plot as such in Zone of Interest, and it's more a film of atmospherics, unsettling imagery and unanswered questions of why they don't ever remark on what goes on over the walls.

Glazer is less interested in providing these answers, but what emerges from the Oscar-nominated film is a damning indictment of how complicit people can be in the horrors around them and how the banality of evil emerges in the most harrowing ways.

Interestingly much of the film is shot from a distance, as if to suggest Glazer doesn't want you to empathise with his subjects when they're told they have to leave their home; there's a distinct lack of intimacy that makes this movie feel even more upsetting - almost as if audiences are being compelled to disassociate from the subjects on screen and consequently your horrot at their ignorance is magnified.

Complete with Mica Levi's dissonant soundtrack, Glazer crafts some disturbing imagery, always just in the background of the frame. From shots of chimneys belching out endless smoke from the Nazis' push to exterminate the Jews to the orange glow that lights up the bedroom windows at night, there's plenty that will take your breath away - and not in a good way.

From conversations about how best to improve efficiencies at the camp to a confession that Höss makes that he was thinking of ways to gas a room full of his peers saluting his work, the Zone of Interest is shocking in ways you'd never, ever expect.

But the fact it does it all in such a matter of fact way is equally as disturbing. 

The end result is utterly numbing; and while this isn't a film about drama or a film about giving answers as to why the Höss family adults never mention what's going on around them, it's a horrifying indictment of those in the past - and also the present - who simply carry out orders or who wilfully choose to ignore what is around them.