★★★1/2
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a feat of filmmaking that challenges its audience. Only a director with the control and vision like Glazer could pull this off, as this is truly an experimental film. It isn’t quite like anything I've ever seen and will be hard to forget. It’s like Glazer just turned on some objective CCTV cameras and pointed them at something happening right now. Except it's not right now, it's 1940s Auschwitz with all the comfortable glass walls of historical artifice and mythology stripped away. The most horrifying and wretched fact is that these people are not distant boogeymen. They are us. And we've turned a blind eye to it.
I've been thinking a lot about the banality of evil in many of 2023's biggest movies. You see it in the casual misogyny of Elvis in Priscilla. You see it in the US official taking Kyoto off the list of targets in Oppenheimer because he went there on honeymoon. You see it in Leo's complete inability to understand or accept the massacre he's personally helped accomplish in Killers of the Flower Moon. You even see it in the suburban life of Gracie in May December, a woman desperate to convince her critics that a deeply disturbed relationship is Actually Fine And Normal. I'm still trying to understand why this idea felt so prominent last year. The Zone of Interest, though, is easily the most blatant in its thesis: atrocities are carried out through the passive acceptance of normal, everyday people—not monsters from another planet. It’s a fact that rings true on a deep level at this moment. Evil has never felt so natural and I don't think I've been more horrified.
In terms of the movie itself—it works more as a harrowing tone poem than a sequential narrative, and after about 45 minutes, you've pretty much understood what it's saying. I started to feel the static nature of that message as the runtime ground on. Nonetheless, it's affecting — especially when it comes to the horrific sound design. I wanted to turn it off several times. I felt sick to my stomach. I don’t think I’ll ever see this one again.
To be perfectly honest, this is a well-made arthouse film that has some truly important messages and is a must-watch, but the experimental nature of it didn’t really work for me. Regardless, it still was an interesting and harrowing piece of filmmaking. I don’t think it is too accessible to most audiences, however.
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