By Sandra Hall
THE ZONE OF INTEREST ★★★★
(M) 106 minutes
The zone of interest sits just outside the wall of Auschwitz. It’s the home of the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, and his wife, Hedwig, and this film by British director Jonathan Glazer, creator of the brutally sardonic gangster movie Sexy Beast, is their story.
The commandant’s house sits beside Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest.
Glazer takes a meticulously forensic approach to the pair, but it could never be said he’s putting them under a microscope. Far from it. He’s determined to keep them at a distance, perhaps afraid that a single close-up might taint the whole exercise.
The script departs so radically from the Martin Amis novel, which gives the film its title, that it doesn’t really qualify as an adaptation. Amis presents a fictionalised version of the Hösses, and he takes you into the camp. Glazer is more interested in the Hösses’ success in insulating themselves from its horrors.
Auschwitz is a word so steeped in grey despair that it’s hard to imagine its atrocities could have taken place under sunny blue skies. Yet, Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller) seem to be living an eternal summer. She, in particular, has found her Eden in the house and garden. She’s so detached from the cruelties suffered by those on the other side of the wall that she has no qualms about helping herself to their confiscated possessions and delights in scoring a mink coat.
Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig, the wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, in The Zone of Interest.
Glazer shot the film with 10 cameras placed in different rooms of the house. These were operated remotely while he sat in a trailer watching the footage on a series of monitors. This technique produces such a weirdly dispassionate tone that you wonder for a while just where the film is heading. But the more you observe the Hösses’ domestic routines the more appalling they become.
Large and fleshy, with a haircut so extreme it looks like a parody of Nazi style, Rudolf seems to love his wife and children, but that’s where his sense of kinship with the human race begins and ends. His sadism is implicit in his attitude to the prisoners, whom he views as commodities to be divided into the usable and the expendable. To him, practicalities are everything. In a Berlin party scene, he surveys the company – a cross-section of the Nazi elite – while entertaining himself with a bizarre hypothetical. Would it be possible to gas so many people in a room with such high ceilings?
And if Hedwig hears the muffled shouts, screams and gunshots coming from the camp, she regards them as an irritating form of “noises off”. When her mother – another committed Nazi – becomes inconveniently spooked by them, she shakes her head in exasperation.
Hüller, who’s up for an Oscar for her finely tuned performance in Anatomy of a Fall, doesn’t play Hedwig as a monster. The clues lie in her ordinariness. Like her husband, she’s utterly devoid of imagination, the embodiment of German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s observation about the banality of evil, which is the point of this fastidiously constructed film. Glazer sits by, watching, while the Hösses incriminate themselves.
The Zone of Interest is released in cinemas on February 22.
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