The Zone of Interest (2023)

User Review

• 

  Barneyonmovies

  7 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: When it comes to something as awful as genocide, it's very easy to think of the perpetrators as entirely inhuman. But in following the daily lives of an SS Officer and his family in their house just outside Auschwitz, Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest,' humanises them in a way that makes their evil feel far more real.
  
  We see Commander Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) having banal meetings with other officers about the slaughter of thousands of people. We see his kids playing in the rivers where the ashes of the dead are dumped after they're gassed. And, perhaps most strangely of all, we see his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) obsessing over their opulent domestic life behind the walls of the death camp.
  
  Like most civilians of the time, we never see the horrors, but we know what's happening not least because of the billowing smoke and stark concrete walls, but because of the truly haunting sound design which mixes screams, groans and clanging metal with the strangest, most horrifying score by Mica Levi.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: Once it's made its point, it doesn't take you anywhere particularly. You're just forced to watch these evil people for a couple of hours and then it ends.
  
  VERDICT: Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest,' humanises evil in a way that makes it ten times more horrifying, and that makes it a very important film indeed.

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