Best movies of 2023 in the US: No 3 – The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest, a British, American and Polish co-production directed by Jonathan Glazer, begins with a scene of bucolic bliss: a German-speaking family picnicking on a riverbank on a summer day. The specifics of character and dialogue are less important – you can barely catch the thread of conversation, anyway – than of the family’s mood: peace, tranquility, ease; on behalf the father, a note of concern. There have been a handful of films this year – Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things, Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – that have excellently refuted the tyranny of story in how we evaluate cinema, emphasizing visual language, sound, rhythm, feeling to hypnotize, immerse and impart. The Zone of Interest is the best of these less plot-predominant films, and to the most nauseating end.

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For the horror begins to creep into the frame as soon as the family returns to their house, a stately villa situated just beside a towering concrete wall. There’s a plume of smoke from the other side; a wordless, sickly looking man delivers supplies in a gray uniform. The delivery includes a box of clothing and a luxe fur coat, for the women of the house to pick over. And there is a relentless, churning background chorus of screams, grunts, grinds; the family’s domestic routines are frequently peppered with the sound of gunshots.

The Zone of Interest, loosely based on a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, works like a contaminant – slow and methodical, the rot largely invisible, leaving you hollowed out and stricken. Embedded with the family of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, we witness not the barbarity on the other side of the wall but the compartmentalization, bureaucracy, domestic labor and disassociation required to perpetuate it.

Mostly, we just witness their routines, their play, their jokes and spats, the horrors they’ve either designed or habituated themselves too, or both. The scale of the atrocities is felt, heard via extraordinary and gutting sound design, obviously indicated, but never seen, never directly visualized. Glazer doesn’t need to. The film’s restraint makes the family’s strained normalcy adjacent to genocide all the more damning, distressing, true.

The banality of evil makes for the most chilling and effective horror movie of the year, in part because Glazer also unravels the cliches around Hannah Arendt’s lasting proclamation on the Holocaust. Everyone, even the children, know on some level what is going on, what they’re hearing. Höss, of course, is orchestrating the genocide, signing off on blueprints of an industrial human crematorium. His wife Hedwig (an outstanding Sandra Hüller), who adores their dream home, warns the Jewish girl who works in their house that she could “have my husband spread your ashes” across the fields. The young boys make gassing sounds at each other as they play. Hedwig’s mother eyes the smokestacks with resigned horror, then sleeps, then goes to breakfast.

Everyone has the capacity to love, to participate in a nuclear family, do the housework, play; everyone except the baby also has the capacity to rationalize and digest mass murder. The Zone of Interest is perhaps the most effective vehicle I’ve seen for demonstrating how humans do this to other humans – a message that, devastatingly and infuriatingly, continues to bear repeating.