(Jewish Group) The Zone of Interest review: Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust film is an unrelenting...

[Behind the Aegis]

The Zone of Interest review: Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust film is an unrelenting portrait of the banality of evil

There's no shortage of films about the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust, but Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest takes a new and effectively horrifying approach to the subject matter.

Zone follows Commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their family as they live in domestic bliss just over the wall of the infamous concentration camp. We never see the atrocities of Auschwitz firsthand; instead, we hear gunshots and screams during a garden party and see the fiery glow and smoke clouds of the crematorium out the bedroom window. The Höss' world is ordered and idyllic, nothing like the imagery we are so often accustomed to in films that depict this era.

Glazer presents audiences with an anthropological study of this Nazi family. Shooting entirely with natural light and multiple simultaneously running cameras, he presents them with a naturalism that belies their evil. For Hoss and his family are just like you and me: Hedwig frets over her meticulously tended garden and Rudolf reads his children bedtime stories. What makes Zone so stomach-turning is the banality of their evil — the ways they go about their daily lives while crimes against humanity occur only a few feet away.

Hoss takes business meetings about increasing crematorium efficiency and frets over the health of the camp's lilac bushes more than the human lives whose fate he holds in his hands. Christian Friedel is chilling as Hoss in the normalcy with which he instills him. He's no mustache-twirling Nazi out of an Indiana Jones film, but merely a family man overly committed to his job.



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The Zone of Interest opens in theaters Dec. 8.