Auschwitz concentration camp, World War II. Nazi commander Rudolf Höss lives in his private house situated right next to the camp, separated by a wall and barbed wire. Rudolf and his wife Hedwig take care of their five children, their garden, and chat with visitors dropping by for a drink. Sometimes, they go far a picnic in the nearby forest and swim in the river. Rudolf is angry that his superiors want to move him away to Oranienburg for another job, because he wants to stay in the house. At a Nazi confference, a new asignment of deportation of Jews to Auschwitz is ordered, and Rudolf is happy he can return back to his home. He walks downstairs and almost vomits.
"The Zone of Interest" is one of the most atypical movies about Auschwitz—most of Holocaust films go for showing the direct horrors of it, while this one sets its framework to only imply it. Not a single murder or crime from within the concentration camp is shown, as its main focus is to just show the 'detached' mentality of its perpetrators, the Nazi commander and his family living peacefully in their house right outside the camp. The ever-growing contradiction of such scenes as his wife Hedwig showing sunflowers, pumpkins and cabbage in the garden to a visitor, who calls it a "dream garden", while the walls with barbed-wire of the concentration camp is seen in the background reaches grotesque levels, thereby dwelling on such issues as ostrich effect and cognitive dissonance, as people living in a totalitarian dictatorship tend to utterly deny inconvenient truth and just shut themselves out in their own ideological world of state propaganda which tells them that everything is ideal. While the director's Jonathan Glazer's previous film "Under the Skin" was an art-film gone wrong, "The Zone of Interest" is an art-film done right. He uses wide and medium shots, and mostly static camera to give a distanced, deliberately cold approach towards these people, refusing a single close-up shot, which works congruently since they are not three-dimensional characters—they are narrowed-down pawns of a dictatorship. It is incredible how such a disturbing story is told in such a calm, tranquil way: Glazer shows an almost underserved subtlety in approachng this theme, resisting to directly attack this ideology, yet everything is clear, maybe precisely because of such a restrained vision where evil is implied only in what is outside the frame. Two unusual sequences stand out stylistically from the rest of the story, yet one can understand why Glazer included them. A nutritional, cultured and elevated art-film about the normalization of evil.
Grade:+++
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