Stunning Zone of Interest

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is an absolutely jaw-dropping film that has deservedly notched five Academy nominations - and the Oscar winner will be announced today, March 10. This US-UK-Poland co-production is the latest Holocaust film to get Oscar glory: its nominations include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Sound, Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) and Best International Feature Film, UK.

The film had already won the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, one of their key extermination camps, and his wife Hedwig, try to build a dream life for their family in a beautiful house and garden, right next to the camp walls. The title comes from the Nazi description of Auschwitz as a zone of interest, a neutral euphemism that concealed the horrors of their operations: six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, mostly Jews.

The film opens and closes with a black screen, in which we hear sounds from the camp and strain to make out what they are. The visuals open with a family picnic by a river, all in sun-dappled, pastoral colours. Then we see the everyday routines of both husband and wife, mostly in the house and garden: he discusses the camp routines with colleagues; she oversees domestic routines and shows her mum the garden, with azaleas. Hedwig tries on a fur coat and examines a metal denture; ash is spread in the garden. A happy family life is fed by robbing living and dead Jews across the garden wall, yet their presence is barely acknowledged.

Everyone is aware of what's going on; even the children play games with a hissing sound like in the gas chambers. But the sound track reveals what we don't see: orders barked; prisoners being shot; the furnaces crackling; the death screams of prisoners. This extraordinary formal experiment - the film team called it Film One (with visuals) and Film Two (with sounds from the camp filled in), where the dissonance between the visuals and the audio leave it to our imagination to fill in the horrors of Auschwitz. Glazer's film is not only about the banality of evil, but how monsters are not only those guys in military uniforms, but also ordinary people like you and me, who can switch off a part of their conscience, and continue to enjoy living a happy, cocooned life, while monstrous evil regularly happens right under our noses, that we choose to ignore. Glazer, a British Jew, also wants to remind us that though the Nazi horrors were mainly from 1933 to 1945, similar hate-fuelled crimes continue unabated in 2024. We can identify with the bourgeois perpetrators in the film.

The direction is impeccable and Glazer's experiments with form are dazzling. He is more interested in atmosphere than a linear story, yet the result is a sock in the solar plexus. Christian Friedel is excellent as Rudolf Hoss, but Sandra Huller is luminous as Hedwig Hoss, the housewife with a feminist streak. The screenplay by Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis, brilliantly does the Film One-Film Two merger to powerful effect. Lukasz Zal's cinematography is remarkable. Glazer and Zal wanted to allow the actors a naturalistic environment, as well as remove themselves from the immediacy of the Nazi horrors, so they had about 10 hidden cameras running at any time for each shot and did not "operate" any; they also didn't want any artificial lighting, so a night scene of a young Polish girl leaving apples in the trenches for the starving prisoners was shot on a thermal camera. Glazer and editor Paul Watts sat in a monitor room some distance away, looking at a wall of screens with live feeds. Watts' decisive editing brings the Nazi horrors home to us in the here and now. The meticulous and spare sound design by Johnnie Burn is compelling, complemented by Mica Levi's music. Chris Oddy's production design, as well as the costume design are meticulous. Producers are James Wilson and Ewa Puszczynska; women crew include the producer and costume designer Malgorzata Karpiuk. Oppenheimer has notched 13 nominations, and Poor Things has 11: The Zone of Interest is a historic tour de force and not to be missed - Oscars or not.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com