Film of the Week: The Zone of Interest

What does it take for one to become desensitized to some of the worst horrors mankind can inflict upon others? Can someone become so utterly tuned out of them that the screams of the dying become simple background noise? As we see on our own news every day as a genocide is committed with our support and funding, it is far easier than one would hope.

It's this conflict that drives The Zone of Interest, the Academy Award-winning latest from Jonathan Glazer, director of Under the Skin and Sexy Beast. In classic Glazer fashion, Zone of Interest is another new turn from him, an almost minimalist domestic drama against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The film focuses on Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his family as they go about their lives in apparent domestic bliss in a home that is directly next to the camp itself. Revealed almost immediately with a cut to the smokestacks towering over the walls surrounding the family's home, the camp hangs like a sword over every moment of the film. It's this contrast of idyllic family life against the backdrop of atrocity that serves as the film's driving force. Rather than attempt to moralize or exploit the suffering for visual horror, Glazer repeatedly and actively keeps the Holocaust in the background to an unnerving, spine-chilling effect, a clear effort to show the dehumanization that made it all possible in the first place. The screams and sobs of the prisoners quietly echo through the background, architects explain the operation of gas chambers the way one would explain the operation of a cash register to a new employee, and in one particularly grim moment, Höss fishes a jawbone from the river, his immediate concern becoming the health of his children playing upstream rather than the thought of how many had to perish for the river to become that polluted in the first place.

Zone of Interest's sound design pulled an upset win over Oppenheimer at the Oscars, and it's hard not to see why. Glazer wields sound incredibly carefully, almost entirely doing away with a score while keeping the background noise at just the right level to unnerve but not distract. It sells the idea of a Höss family as people who have attuned themselves to horror, content to profit off it with stolen clothes and pilfered gold teeth while pushing the emotional weight of it to the back of their minds. But, try as they might, their complicity is inescapable, and their attempts to avoid it simply rot their souls. Höss fights to stop himself from vomiting as he prepares to oversee an operation that will kill 700,000 Hungarian Jews, while his wife, Hedwig, fights against any attempt to take away her newfound luxury, from urging Hoss to keep their family at Auschwitz while he leaves for a promotion to angrily burning a letter left by her horrified mother, who left in the dead of night after visiting the family.

This cold detachment is perfectly played by both Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who, respectively, play Rudolf and Hedwig. Friedel plays Hoss with a sense of bueracratic pride and stoicism, his workmanlike management of the camp contrasting against the acts committed within it, from his calm oversight of a line of desperate prisoners being led off a train to his address of violent rapes of prisoners by guards being framed as a warning not to "damage the flowers", while Hüller is monstrous in her portrayal of Hedwig. Hedwig is immensely stubborn and demanding, lashing out at anyone who would attempt to pierce the picture-perfect world she has crafted in an effort to escape from the guilt of her knowledge of what that world is built off of.

But the guilt is inescapable, and the film's final moments, a jarring vision of the future (our present) of Auchwitz, seem to show both Rudolf and us, the audience, that history is the ultimate judge. While Rudolf and Hedwig are both assigned to the dustbin of history, their legacies little more than obscure accomplices to mass murder, that leaves us. As the credits roll, The Zone of Interest sits with you, leaving you to wonder how we will be looked back upon, even as we assure ourselves that we would never act as they did.

 

Film of the Week: Daddy Longlegs

The career of the Safdie brothers, the auteur duo behind Good Time and Uncut Gems, is often focused on getting their audience to root for characters that are largely undeserving of sympathy. From sociopathic criminals to degenerate gamblers, the brothers (and the very talented actors portraying these parts) manage to make their antiheroes often feel like real, living people, enabling them to walk a tightrope when it comes to capturing the audience's attention and empathy.

Daddy Longlegs, the first film in which the duo worked together as directors, is no different. Even with lower stakes, a slice-of-life depiction of a single dad enjoying his two weeks of custody with his kids rather than the nerve-wracking crime thrillers that make up the Safdies later work, the film bears much of their trademark tactics for building tension, from the grainy, shaky camerawork to the often overwhelming (complimentary) sound design employed throughout it's chaotic conversations. It gives Daddy Longlegs the energy of the audience stumbling upon a particularly upsetting home movie, one where the happy memories are instead a series of agonizingly poor decisions that play out like a car crash in slow motion. 

This is aided by the excellent performance of Ronald Bronstein, better known as the duo's cinematographer, as Lenny. Lenny is twitchy, ill-tempered, and increasingly shortsighted, struggling to find some level of meaning for himself outside of his sons, only to repeatedly realize he has little else. Even at his nastiest and most bumbling, Lenny never feels like a caricature, and it makes his screw-ups often agonizing to witness.

In a particularly standout sequence, Lenny drugs his sons to ensure they sleep through his shift as a projectionist, only to realize he wildly overdosed them, effectively putting them into a days-long sleep. His reaction? To halfheartedly check in on them while he dicks around in the city, too self-centered to directly face the consequences of his actions but not sociopathic enough to completely ignore them. Bronstein plays Lenny as a man on the cusp of self-realization, but unable to go through with it, leaving someone who lashes out at the world to make up for it. From his awkward, flailing lies to everyone around him to his treatment of his on-off girlfriend Leni (Elenore Hendricks), much of Lenny's arc is him realizing his mistakes mere moments after making them. It's frustratingly relatable, and it makes Lenny's actions in the film's final moments feel like a natural conclusion to his selfish nature rather than a cartoonish turn that a lesser story could've turned it into.

And good god, the ending. In a twist clearly inspired by the works of Abel Ferrera, the duo's self-admitted inspiration to the point that he has a particularly "fun" cameo as a foul-mouthed scalper turned armed robber, Lenny chooses to simply take the boys for himself, abruptly packing his things and taking them to parts unknown, a kidnapping committed out of a selfish desire for happiness. Rather than pull the punch, having Lenny's plan thwarted or some horrible karmic fate befall him, the film instead ends on an uncertain note, a static shot of a tram pulling away as Lenny and his sons seemingly get away, their ultimate fates uncertain. It's a fitting end for a work that treats its audience as observers. Our glimpse into Lenny's life is over, and we can only watch and hope for the best as he leaves us behind.