★★★★½
By Vanessa Huang
When making a film about the Holocaust, do you risk mining trauma for awards buzz and commodifying suffering for spectacle, all as some kind of validation that we were always the good guys? Or do you blur the lines between us and them, and risk appealing to the humanity of the architects of genocide – perhaps even making them sympathetic?
The banality of evil, Hannah Arendt wrote, comes in the often frightening normalcy of its perpetrators. This mundanity is, to be clear, assumed on the part of the perpetrators – a dissonance that makes the most egregious of evils utterly clinical to them. To them, these are simply the norms of society. To them, it’s all a matter of routine.
And this is where Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, finds its footing. We centre on Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), real-life SS officer, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children – all appearing to live a life replete with pastoral pleasures: bedtime stories, summertime swims, and birthday celebrations. Until we realise their house is adjacent to Auschwitz. And until we see traces of the atrocities seeping through this veneer – human remains washing up in a river near their home, screams and crematorium smoke reduced to ambient elements amid their humdrum domesticity, ‘shopping’ as the plundering of Jewish people’s belongings. Glazer’s singular direction is critical here, putting detached formalism and unfathomable horror together in symbiosis. It’s difficult to imagine any other director pulling this off.
