Here’s a new trailer for Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.”
It conveys the mood of the film, and the setting as well. The film takes place entirely in this Nazi family’s domicile — the backyard, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Despite being surrounded by a Jewish extermination camp, they stay put and only in one key scene do we venture outside of this setting.
For me, the last 10 minutes of the film are what brings it up to a notch in quality. These final few moments pack a major wallop. “The Zone of Interest” is in theaters on December 15th.
Here’s what I wrote about the film at Cannes:
First things first, this is an ice-cold art film, through and through. There’s no other way to put it. It's a meticulously delivered and minimalist 104-minute film — a carefully constructed treatise on the banality of evil. It does however leave you feeling very detached and cold. It’s basically an anti-drama.
The film opens with a 3-minute overture in total darkness and ends with a stunner of a scene. Mica Levi’s score is also astonishingly bleak in its thumping simplicity. I can’t imagine the film being as effective without Levi’s handprint on it.
Set during the early years of WWII, the film is almost exclusively set at the home of the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, following his family who, incredibly, live right next door to a concentration camp. Consider the scene where they swim in their outdoor pool as screams of horror are heard in the background. The Höss’ don’t even flinch, they’re having too much fun in the water.
All throughout the film you watch the Höss family, his wife and 5 kids, perform mundane tasks at their home all while cries and gunshots can be heard far away outside in the far background. They seem completely unaffected by it.
The film is almost exclusively composed of wide shots, the camera always far away from its subjects. It feels as though a lot of thought and purpose was put into each and every frame by Glazer. It’s almost Kubrickian in its obsessive attention to detail.
Michael Haneke once stated that Hollywood never got the holocaust right on-screen. I do wonder how he would feel about Glazer’s artfully austere approach. What Glazer has proven here is that there are new ways to tell the story of the holocaust.