Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, World War II. Hungarian-Jewish Dr. Miklós Nyiszli works for the Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele dissecting corpses in the hopes that his own family will be spared from death. Jews and other prisoners are being brought to the camp, killed in gas chambers, and then the Jewish Sonderkommando throws their corpses in the crematoria and removes the ash. Tired of this complicity, several Sonderkommando members, including Hoffman, Abramowics and Max, secretly smuggle gunpowder and weapons to start a rebellion, but this plan is stalled when they cannot agree upon if they only want to blow up a crematoria or try to escape. In the end, the start a rebellion to just blow up parts of the camp, but are arrested and executed by the Nazis.
Just like most of Holocaust movies, "The Grey Zone", included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, is an appropriately dark, depressive and disturbing film which shows a fall of a civilization, a dictatorship creating a hell on Earth, based on the eyewitness account of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli who worked in Auschwitz. Its main theme is, obviously, the contemplation about pure evil and the search for good, but there is also another one: how far would people go in their conformity, how much of their own integrity would they be willing to sacrifice, just to save their own life? This is illustrated in a (negatively) unforgettable sequence, where Hoffman recounts a story of a man in Auschwitz who became a Sonderkommando member, and helped push the naked corpses of his wife, his daughter, and even his own grandchildren into the fire of the crematorium, only to save his own skin and continue living in the concentration camp. The whole movie is a slow-burning rebellion of these Sonderkommando members, Jews who helped kill other Jews just to postpone their own ineviateble death for a few more months, who awaken against their own pliability, show bravery, and decide to at least try to make a difference.
The director Tim Blake Nelson crafts several traumatic sequences, all the more harrowing when one has in mind that they were not invented, but actually happened: Hoffman, a Sonderkommando member, lies to the newly arrived inmates that they will only have a "shower", that "one lice can be fatal to them", to "remember the number where they hanged their coat", and that they will see their family members as soon as they are cleaned, only for all these naked people to enter the gas chamber, the Sonderkommando close the door, lock it—and from there onwards only screams from the inside are heard—parallel with Hoffman sitting outside the door, ashamed. In another electrifying sequence, a Nazi official lines up a hundred women out in the field, and starts shooting them one by one, unless the two women who smuggled gunpowder reveal their plan to him—in order to stop these shootings, the two women commit suicide, one by jumping on the electric fence, the other aiming the machine-gun of the Nazi and shooting herself. Harvey Keitel is great as the SS officer Muhsfeldt, who uses the power of his command just as a prosthesis of his own ego and narcissism, as well as Steve Buscemi as inmate Abramowics. There is no optimism here. Everything in the story is depressive from start to finish, and just becomes more and more depressive. All the inmates who arrive at this concentration camp will not escape it alive. "The Grey Zone" is an unpleasant, but essential cinema that gives a three-dimensional depiction of a horrible historical event—and a meditation on passivity, servility and forced choice.
Grade:+++
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