L Movie Review 1A Holocaust movie in the way a skull MRI is a mugshot, Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest is a tribulation of evasion and restraint — in the best ways possible. As you watch this sinister, elusive thing, suffering its moral distance as if you’re holding your breath underwater, you feel every media representation of the Holocaust — every simplified conclusion and revulsed platitude — dissolve into goo. Adapted from the comparatively farcical novel by Martin Amis, Glazer’s movie is an aloof challenge, insisting in its horrifying coolness that you have your own subjective experience with it. What you take away is largely contingent on who you are.

Most of us know enough about the Holocaust, specifically, Auschwitz, to let Glazer’s strategy do a job on us, in a calm cataract of brutal details that never comes close to being explicit. (An uninformed or duped viewer who knows or believes little about the history would be mystified.) Whereas Amis’s book, because it’s an Amis book, fictionalizes and pulpifies the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, conjuring up a web of marital suspicions and murder plots, Glazer largely sticks to the documented facts, weaving a web of mundanity that is only occasionally spiked by the wispy trace of atrocity. Conjured with fastidious precision, the comfortable-posh home of Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), is a happy, self-satisfied bustle of children, servants, thriving gardens, birthday parties, family feasts, contented bedtimes and gossipy visitors — all of it nestled right up against the death camp’s outer wall, with the familiar watchtowers and billowing smokestacks looming in the background against a relentlessly beautiful blue sky. Glazer shoots in wide shot, mostly letting his compositions do the screaming; virtually every scene of familial hubbub and middle-class luxury is framed by the walls of the camp, beyond which, in Johnnie Burn’s insidious sound design, the business of genocide and corpse disposal is faintly heard and easily ignored by the Höss household, if hardly so by us.

 While nothing significant ever seems to happen, extraordinarily, it’s still a scenario under infernal pressure; reality is being shredded under the surface. Glazer dares to humanize Rudolf and Hedwig only to the extent that they appear to be normal, attentive spouses and parents while actively engaged in systematic extermination — which is what they were. For all of their comforts and success within the Reich, they’re not particularly satisfied or joyful people, merely tense with privilege. But the Hösses’ contrived little heaven — a leveling parody of suburbanite self-satisfaction in general, if you’re willing to go there — only begins to crack when Höss is relieved of the camp’s command and given a promotion, to supervise the Final Solution program as it presses into Hungary. Furious and house-proud, Hedwig digs her heels in and tells him to go on without her and the children. As a dramatic crisis point it’s almost laughably banal, and Glazer never asks us to care, only to acknowledge the Hösses’ unexceptional, confounding humanity. And that, in a stomach-churning way, is the worst part.

Manifesting Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to a degree Arendt couldn’t even have imagined, The Zone of Interest deals out the matter-of-fact splats of suggestive horror like death cards: the delivered pile of stolen silk lingerie the Höss servants pick through, the wheelbarrow full of ashes being dug into the garden, the moment one Höss boy locks the other in the greenhouse as though it were a gas chamber, the vanishing of Hedwig’s visiting mother after the woman dared to look out her second-story window and over the walls at night. (Toward the end, Glazer lets rip with a meta-textual sidle, cutting to Auschwitz today as a real janitorial staff spiffs it up for visitors.) It’s a film imbued with an unearthly gravity, filled with heavy absences — what’s not shown, not said, not thought by the characters, and not laid out for us in the graphic terms of the ordinary “Holocaust movie.” (Only Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, with its total elision of archive footage, and Lazslo Nemes’s Son of Saul, with its suffocatingly limited POV, attempted anything similar.) Glazer insists on our incapacity to understand the Holocaust in any personal, moral terms — although, ironically, the racist-nationalist paradigm that fueled it still surrounds us, all over the globe.

Movies, particularly if they intend to represent history or biography, tend to be monsters of oversimplification, and Holocaust movies tend to pare away the elemental ambiguity of the Final Solution by focusing only on the victims’ suffering (not necessarily the victims as individuals; see Spielberg), and by creaturizing the murderers. Obviously, a good number of viewers would like to keep it that way, as the survivors dwindle to a handful and cultural memory threatens to bury it in the distant and unrelatable past. But how easy that aesthetic seems now (see Life Is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, et al.), compared to which Glazer’s anthropological tact feels like a step forward, a clear-headed essay on the distance we must cross before we can hope to understand human barbarity. Which is not to say we ever might.

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