The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest makes one formal decision and follows it without exception: the film stays entirely inside the household of a concentration camp commandant and his family, as they raise their children, tend a garden, and host swimming parties on the other side of a wall from the camp he runs — and it never once shows what is happening beyond that wall. The atrocity is entirely present, in the low industrial hum on the soundtrack, in smoke drifting past a hedge, in an offhand comment about a prisoner's coat, but it is never staged, because the film's actual subject is the mechanism that allows people to build an ordinary domestic life directly adjacent to horror without appearing to notice it.

The commandant's wife is played with an unnerving, specific ordinariness — proud of her garden, irritated by a transfer that might disrupt her household, entirely unbothered by the ash occasionally falling from the sky. Glazer refuses the audience the usual emotional release valves of a Holocaust film: no rescue, no visible suffering to weep at, no villain who registers his own villainy.

What's left is the sound design and the unbearable banality of the images themselves, forcing the audience to do the work the characters refuse to do — to actually look at what's on the other side of the wall, even though the film won't show it to them directly.

— Amir Morsali, BIPA Editorial