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Last week in London, MPs overseeing plans for a new Holocaust memorial near Parliament heard from actual survivors. The designs were criticised as short-sighted. Among the witnesses was German-British cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager. She reserved particular scorn for the memorial’s proposed “learning centre”. What exactly, she asked, might be learnt now that hadn’t been in the past 80 years? “We shouldn’t kill each other? Good idea.”
And so we come to The Zone of Interest, the Oscar-nominated new film from British writer-director Jonathan Glazer, loosely adapting Martin Amis’s 2014 novel. It confronts the Holocaust both head-on and at an angle: a memorial of a very modern kind.
To begin, for long moments, there is only a black screen, and a semi-musical howl on the soundtrack. If this were the whole film, it might say it all. But Glazer has other ideas to explore. And so we finally cut to a gaggle of happy children and their parents by a glinting lake in summer.
If this precise moment did not take place in 1942 or so, one much like it surely did. The family have been summoned from real 20th-century history. The mother is Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller); the father Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel); the idyll is courtesy of the latter’s role as commandant of nearby Auschwitz.
Adjacent to the camp, the family’s spruce home and large flower garden act as backdrop for the central conceit: a close-up portrait of humdrum life, going on in the heart of genocide. (The film was shot on the site of Auschwitz, in a similar house to that of the Hösses.) The camp wall is visible, but nothing is ever seen beyond, victims included: one of Glazer’s many creative choices.
And yet we constantly hear the obscenity: an awful low hum, occasionally punctuated by barking dogs or human screams. The Hösses sometimes slightly raise their voices above it, as you might with a car alarm across the road. The evocation of horror ignored is masterful. But there is much restless invention besides: interludes shot with thermal imaging; a whirring sense of vérité achieved by filming with remote cameras.
The director’s last film was the great minimalist sci-fi Under the Skin (2013). His gift for ripping up old blueprints can be thrilling. Still, it takes a rare self-confidence to seek to personally reframe this subject matter. The result surely needs to do more than simply restate Hannah Arendt’s familiar idea of the banality of evil, itself now 60 years old.
The film often does. That nightmare soundscape under halcyon blue skies may prompt us to ask what in 21st-century life we now make small talk over. And Hüller and Friedel do astonishing work with punishing roles, making the Hösses small and squalid, but gleaming too with realised dreams of luxury and status.
And yet in other moments, the film simply falls back into restating Arendt, at length. Yes, the commandant of Auschwitz also enjoyed a rose garden. At which you may hear an inner voice not unlike Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, asking of this skilled and provocative film, after all these years — and? Like another technically brilliant Oscar favourite, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the movie comes to feel less an insight than an illustration. Maybe that opening black screen really should have been the whole movie. The ultimate truth about the abyss is that there is nothing here to see.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from February 2
