The Zone of Interest

Glazer’s uncompromising and chilling vision of evil is unlike any other film about Nazism.

The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.

It’s a disturbing work, guided by a discomforting sense of immaculateness that chills the viewer. It is the sanitation the film performs, which speaks to the now, in a way few Holocaust films have done before.

It’s a stunning film – thoughtful, challenging and disturbing.

The Zone of Interest insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

The soundtrack of the Hösses’ daily lives is a reminder of the nightmare taking place just beyond the wall outside their home, and these sounds, relentless in their sense of evocativeness, give an extra layer of the uncanny to Höss’s already unsettling character.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

I have loved Jonathan Glazer for some time, I appreciated Under The Skin, absolutely adored Sexy Beast and even enjoyed Birth very much, but here, finally, he has found his material. His crisp and clear photography just simply plants you with these people, with the sights and more potently, the unavoidable sounds. You are like the black dog, contextless, moving in and out of places, sometimes watching, sometimes being ushered away. Glazer's attention to pacing, shot length and editing is exquisite; he crafts a listless ordinary film as tightly as a coiled spring and as tense as a trebuchet. It is not artless, however, and still trades in some avant-garde and strange techniques that never feel out of place. It wasn't the very clever way of breathing new relevancy into the holocaust genre that resonated most with me, it wasn't the haunting ending credits music that says: stay in your seat and endure or walk outside and discuss, but you won't be talking about this film here, now. What resonated most was the ending collection of scenes on the mundanity and gently servile nature of keeping even things as horrifying as the holocaust alive. It was a powerfully moving and contextualising coda that I rarely see in film.

I got what they wanted to show here, but for me I would've still preferred it more with either a story or at showing even darker scenes - yes the idea is to show how **** family lived like it is all normal there, but still

Easily the most challenging film of this year's awards race, "The Zone Of Interest" is borderline directionless as a narrative, practically emotionless as a character study and devoid of nearly any sort of "entertainment value" whatsoever— and that's precisely the point. This is a sterile, cold and unfeeling glimpse at the terrifyingly human individuals behind one of history's greatest atrocities and it's certified to make your skin crawl. Jonathan Glazer really outdid himself here in how he went about making this. In fact, the ways in which this film was crafted (namely the sound design, which absolutely deserved its Academy Award nomination, by the way) actually makes for a more fulfilling story than the one at the center of this film. Sometimes I couldn't help but feel like the movie's only real trick was the whole "can you believe all of this is happening next door to these people?" dichotomy and, for the first few times, it's potent and provocative. After a while, though, it loses its luster. That's not to say this is a bad movie or anything. Just one I ended up appreciating more than enjoying and I'm sure if you were to ask Jonathan Glazer, he'd say that's exactly the place he wants his audience to be.

I don't know how the standards have changed so that a movie like this gets universal acclaim. I thought it was absolutely dreadful. Once again, a director is trying to make "great cinema" in a form that the little man in the movie business obviously imagines these days. But there's nothing great here, except perhaps boredom. The story is literally non-existent, there's not even much plot. The sets are horribly sterile and artificial. This may be intentional, but it destroys any immersion. The camera work is completely inorganic, almost irritatingly uniform in the outdoor scenes. It gives the impression that this was deliberately chosen in order to be able to insert the CGI backdrop with as little position calculation as possible. The entire film - including the exterior scenes - looks as if it was shot in a studio. In my opinion, the highly praised sound design is a joke. A few screams, gunshots, muffled rumbling and in the few false color scenes (is that supposed to be infrared?) an obscene, artificially deep pitched burp - I can't describe it any other way. And then - completely without warning - the movie simply ends. At an absolutely inappropriate point, in the middle of the "plot". Before that, a few scenes from the present have been cut in, showing the cleaning ladies sweeping and vacuuming the present-day museum. What is that supposed to tell us? I don't understand it. And to be honest, I'm not interested either. I'd rather watch Schindler's List again.

The Zone of Uninterest, more like. What a snooze-fest! Nothing noteworthy occurs throughout the entire runtime. This film is a one-trick pony, and it's an impressively mundane trick.