Good Reading’s resident film reviewer, Clive Hodges reviews The Zone of Interest, a film loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis.
Classification: M (Holocaust themes)
running time: 1 hour 46 minutes;
language: German (English subtitles)
director: Jonathan Glazer;
genre: history, drama.
Zone of Interest (in German: Interessengebiet) is the immediate area around a concentration camp. The home of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss, is within the zone of interest of the camp he manages. In fact, the plot of land on which the house is built is so close, it shares a wall with the compound.
Gun shots and sirens can be heard; smoke can be seen coming out of the chimneys. Yet, Hoss, his wife and five children live their lives as if nothing untoward is happening the other side of the wall. Leigh Paatsch in his review for The Courier-Mail mentions this and then writes: what we choose not to see, ultimately becomes what we choose not to feel.
The upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy praise Hoss for the efficient way he is achieving his killing targets and his promotion of improvements to the ovens so that numbers can be increased. Not until the Nuremberg Trials did he accept the evil of the Holocaust. To him, he was given a job; he did it efficiently.
Jonathan Glazer, the director of the film and writer of the script – based loosely on the novel by Martin Amis – elects to film from afar. The slow pace, the sudden appearance of black screens, and the long silences, failed to grab my interest. I found the film dreary but profound; obscure but worthy. I was hoping for close-ups of faces … showing pleasure, puzzlement and, maybe, disgust. There were none that I could remember.
I’ll wait for the DVD and, in the extras, the director’s scene-by-scene explanatory comments.
Three stars
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
