This is a Holocaust movie but it's impossible to see.
Jonathan Glazer didn't want to make a Holocaust movie because there's no accurate way to depict such horror; it's either going to be too sanitized or too unbearable, both are irresponsible.
Even more than that: cinematic language as we know it, for the most part, was pioneered in Nazi propaganda films, so Glazer abandons every cinematic rule possible. This isn't a movie that's even meant to be watched, necessarily.
He 'depicts' the Holocaust solely with audio and, visually, we're locked in with the Nazi family who live next door to Auschwitz. Just as a wall separates profound suffering from idyllic family life, Glazer creates an audio-visual bifurcation; the movie you're watching and the movie you're hearing are polar opposites. Even the subtitles are sometimes obscured by some of the natural light because what they're saying is irrelevant; we're not meant to be invested. No matter how pretty you think a flower looks or how breathtaking the sunset is on the vista: there's the billowing smoke from the crematorium or the steam from a train arriving with more victims somewhere in the frame.
There are scenes of mundanity at breakfast, tranquility in their garden, love in their bed, and fun in their pool...but the soundtrack is the most horrific shit you've ever heard, courtesy of Johnnie Burn's sound design; gunshots, dogs growling, babies crying, gathered screams, Nazis laughing, and ghoulish gargling. The most prevalent noise (and I mean it's fucking CONSTANT) is the rumbling of the ovens. That hum never goes away, even when you shut the movie off. It never tells you what's going on, it just plays on what you already know and brought with you.
There is a reprieve but, like the rest of the movie, it's denied any cinematic varnish. A series of vignettes are strung through as we check in on a polish girl hiding apples around the camp every night. Since Glazer doesn't want to use artificial light and thus compromise his intentions, he shot these scenes with a thermal camera. It's such an ingenious innovation but it's also like Glazer himself 'hid' this from the main narrative; her warmth is quite literally glowing for us to see.
And when we finally see her outside of such obfuscation, she's playing a song she had found in the mud; Joseph Wulf's 'Sunbeams,' written while he was in Auschwitz. In Yiddish we're told what it is and the lyrics appear, without being sung:
“Sunbeams, radiant and warm/Human bodies, young and old; And who are imprisoned here, Our hearts are yet not cold.”
It's such an astonishing moment because we finally have something of an expression by a Jew but we can't see or hear them. Even just typing about it right now feels diminutive of the existential enormity. Of course it's brief as there's inevitably a cut back to the lives of the Nazis for the rest of the movie.
Of all the movies from 2023 about evil, complicity, and ignorance (Oppenheimer, Killers Of The Flower Moon, May December), none of them came close to what The Zone Of Interest accomplished.
At the 2024 Oscars, after winning for Best International Feature, Jonathan Glazer said this as his voice trembled, his hands shook and protestors stood outside the building chanting about the genocide in Gaza:
“All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say ‘look what they did then’ — rather, ‘look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
And, just like Oppenheimer, Zone Of Interest ends looking at the future. But, unlike Oppenheimer, Zone's future is our present and the look is a 4th wall break that rhetorically asks us which side of the wall we live on.
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