Awards Season: The Zone Of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) & Poor Things (Yorghos Lanthimos)

Nominated for five Oscars and nine BAFTA’s, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an impressive WWII movie about what Hannah Arendt described as ‘The banality of Evil.’

The year is 1942 and the story doesn’t take place inside Auschwitz, but just outside the infamous concentration camp. Or to be more precise: most of the ‘action’ take place in the house (and garden) that belong to Commander Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig, their five children and their female (and Jewish) servants. The garden looks especially bucolic, which is as it should be as Rudolf and Hedwig (especially Hedwig) are building their own Garden of Eden there. Yes that’s right, just outside the camp where thousands of Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime are burnt to a crisp every day.

We never get to see what happens inside Auschwitz, but we hear it on the soundtrack: the noise from the incinerators, the muffled screams from the prisoners, the sound of gunfire. It goes on and on, but the occupants inside the house, and their guests, have learned to ignore it. It’s a small price to pay for doing Hitler’s dirty work and it won’t stop the family from living their best life.

The children are probably too young to understand what’s really going on, but when Rudolf takes a couple of them swimming in the nearby river, he recoils when he realizes he is swimming near human remains and he briskly orders his kids out of the water, before taking them home for a wash.

Another time Rudolf gets a visit from a couple of businessmen who want to promote their new incinerator, that can go on continuously, because it’s really a two-in-one incinerator. While one part is being cleaned, you use the other one, and vice versa.

The horror that I feel when writing these words exists in my own imagination, cause as I said, we never experience the horror first hand. 

The movie doesn’t follow a conventional plot. One major development happens when Rudolf finds out that he has to lead another camp, which infuriates Hedwig cause she doesn’t want to move house after all she’s done with this one.

In the end the family doesn’t have to move and Rudolf gets another promotion because he is so efficient at his job. He is always thinking about the best ways to gas as many people as possible in one go.

The Zone of Interest is filmed in a very detached way, with no close-ups. The scenes inside the house were filmed using ten fixed cameras and only natural light, so the actors could just go about their characters  daily routines without having to worry about camera positions. 

This documentary approach makes for very uncomfortable viewing. Not because we start to sympathize with the characters, but because you get a sense of how they just quietly went about their business, without anyone confronting them with their evil ways and trying to come across as civilized as possible.

Jonathan Glazer is a former video and commercial director, who before this made the British crime thriller Sexy Beast, the Nicole Kidman-starrer Birth and the sci-fi thriller Under the Skin (2013). All acclaimed, good to great movies, but The Zone of Interest is his best one yet. It really gets under your skin.

POOR THINGS (Yorghos Lanthimos)

Yorghos Lanthimos is one of the most interesting directors working today. His latest movie, the widely acclaimed Poor Things, is a steampunk science fiction fantasy, spearheaded by a fearless performance by Emma Stone.