Critics reviews

Yes, The Zone Of Interest is about atrocity, but more importantly it is about the attitude towards it. Stylistically, there is a detachment, to match that of the perpetrators. And that’s what gets into your bones.

The Zone of Interest’s coup de grâce is never showing any activity within Auschwitz itself, allowing only the sounds of the camp to be a constant, nerve-racking presence. Woodpecker or machine gun? Crying baby or dying woman? The horrors of the camp are utterly ignored by the family as we, the audience, can think of nothing else. It is a brilliant tactic, this brazen display of indifference and complicity, because it pointedly reflects our own.

Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin) has a reputation as a stylist but, while his new film is certainly stylised, its portrait of Nazi domesticity in the shadow of the Auschwitz chimneys is executed with an objective, chilly control that eschews false rhetoric, leaving maximum space for the audience’s imaginative and emotional response.

The Zone of Interest captures a different kind of ordinariness, not the kind made tragic in retrospect but the kind imposed on tragedy by sheer force of will.

What Glazer does with The Zone of Interest is give the audience just a taste of that shock, and then force us into thinking. He never shows the atrocities outright — not to pique our curiosity but because we do not want to see them. To depict it would be, in its own way, an atrocity.

The fact that "The Zone of Interest" arrives now, as world powers manipulate the narrative to sanitize their crimes, makes Glazer's images all the more chilling. Glazer’s intermingling of the now and the then, appearance versus truth, life and annihilation are rendered into unignorable magnitude.

All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

Glazer’s diminution of the perpetrators themselves is a cinematic reinforcement of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil: of deportation and extermination as the product of the numbingly mindless routine of the bureaucratic mind.

“The Zone of Interest,” the brilliantly disquieting new movie from the English writer-director Jonathan Glazer... It’s a horror film that keeps its horrors rigorously hidden from view.

Glazer has a rather limited, thuddingly literal understanding of representation. In each and every one of his meticulously composed frames, he does little more than portentously accentuate the out-of-field, drawing attention to what lies just beyond the visible image.

This is no simple political message movie, nor is it even a portrait of one of the most horrific moments in history. Instead, The Zone of Interest is the hellish counterpart to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, another film about the soulless march of the careerist’s life. Only in Glazer’s version, the march is a goose step.

Glazer’s removed camerawork lets the Nazi project play out with the deadpan horror of a dystopia, even as it notably avoids techniques that might foster an emotional identification with the family dynamics and actually shake up an audience.