I don’t know what the hell I just watched. Not since Gaspar Noé’s IRREVERSBILE has a movie used sound and black, red, and white screens to f*ck with audiences’ heads so darkly. In Noé’s film, the horrors are on the screen; in Jonathan Glazer’s film, everything is off the screen.
The premise is audiences get to watch Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, spend time with his five kids and wife, doing boring daily household activities. Yet, the shocking part is that Höss’s home was right next to the concentration camp. So his family is in this German oasis while the horrors are vividly heard offscreen. The word “vivid” doesn’t do it justice. Audiences will listen to some of the most terrifying sound design ever made in a film while watching THE ZONE OF INTEREST. And yet, while this sounds frightening, it only works for about fifteen minutes or so. After the gimmick wears off, we are stuck watching a German family do mundane things for nearly two hours.
It’s clear Jonathan Glazer is issuing a warning that if we stand by and do nothing while the atrocities of war, racism, and more are happening in our lives, history is doomed to repeat itself. Yet, the vehicle he chooses to make this point in falls in “The Zone of Uninterest.”
It’s available in limited theatrical release starting on December 15th.