Is The Zone of Interest simply uninteresting?
“... every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
Basil Hallward, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey
Some of you will be considering if you should go and watch the Oscar winning The Zone of Interest (2023) this weekend.
You should.
In this review I will mostly focus on the film itself rather than the politics that now surrounds it.
Overall, I hope to explain why you should give this remarkable movie the big screen viewing it deserves.
Glazer’s Career
Jonathan Glazer is a consistently engaging, if not prolific, art and commercial film director. He is also a very talented moving image advertiser and music video maker. His work is often excellent.
Glazer could still become one of the best British film makers of his generation but at age of 58 he only has four feature films under his belt. He really does need to produce a bit more work. I hope he does. Tempus fugit.
Stout drinkers and celebrants of St. Patrick’s last weekend may recall his Guinness Surfer (1999) advert, whilst more sensitive types of a similar age might remember his darkly comic video for Radiohead’s Karma Police (1997).
His two most recent art films, Under the Skin (2013) and The Zone of Interest (2023), are, in my view, outstanding, the first perhaps more so than the second. Both have frustrated and delighted critics and audiences in equal measure. One reason for this is that neither was conceived in terms of mainstream cinematic expectations. These are not Marvel movies.
As such, they differ from his first two features, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004), both of which were more popular and generic in their orientation. These films were also excellent, but in quite different ways. I am especially fond of the beautifully odd but also intentionally troubling Birth.
A War at the Oscars, Again
Glazer, the man, is currently in the eye of a media storm, one that he has himself created. Mostly this relates to his politics and not to his new film. Up to this point, Glazer hasn’t really been a political filmmaker.
At the Oscars last week Glazer chose to peel off his delicate artistic gloves and to directly enter into the bare knuckle and often ugly world of international politics. In a nervous speech in Los Angeles Glazer used his platform to offer a somewhat obliquely expressed view on the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel. Glazer also made a statement about how he felt some were using Jewish identity in the discussion of this war. Glazer is himself a British Jew.
More specifically, and controversially, Glazer also suggested that there was a similarity between the German Nazi dehumanisation that he so effectively depicts in The Zone of Interest and what he believes he has seen in the current war, both in the initial Hamas led attack on Israeli civilians and with Israel’s subsequent military response. In making these comments he also referred to what he sees as the Israeli occupation and asked a question: “How do we resist?”
You can watch his acceptance speech here and can judge for yourself what he meant. It probably helps to watch his film before you reach your conclusion.
Right now there is of course a real war going on between Israel and Hamas and the stakes for those who are directly involved - the Israelis and the Palestinians - could not be higher. The war has also had a significant impact globally, especially within the United States and the United Kingdom. So it should come as no surprise to Glazer that his comments have provoked a passionate set of responses. As we might expect, those who are generally critics of Israel have tended to celebrate Glazer, whilst those who see Israel as defending itself against a lethal existential threat have typically attacked him. Some of the criticism directed at Glazer has been deeply personal but Glazer surely knew what would follow. He has been described by some as a Jew hating Jew.
Art Before Politics in Film Criticism
Whatever one’s views on Glazer’s comments, his latest film might be either good or bad independently of his politics. Serious film criticism, I believe, must try to distinguish between the quality of the art, the politics of the artist and perhaps also the politics that an artist expresses within their art. I don’t much like the worldview of Michael Cimino, but The Deer Hunter (1978), to take one example, surely is one of the very best Vietnam films.
Before Glazer gave his speech the American Motion Picture Academy judged that The Zone of Interest was the Best International Feature Film of the year. This is the first time in film history that a British film by a British director has received this accolade from the most important film academy in the world. We Brits ought to take some pride in Glazer’s cinematic achievement.
But Glazer’s film, much like his political comments last week, has divided opinion. Mostly the film has been praised by film critics, and rightly so, but some have also argued that the film is either tiresome, or was made in bad taste. Here I’d like to focus on these negative comments, so that we might clarify what is positive about the film.
Glazer’s Unique Take
The Zone of Interest, in my view, is a remarkable film. It is perhaps not as good as Birth, a touching, troubling and inventive commercial supernatural thriller, which explores both the pain that we all feel when we lose a loved one, as well as the psychological delusions that this pain can generate.
It might also be true that in the final analysis The Zone of Interest is not as aesthetically powerful as his previous philosophically inclined art sci-fi Under the Skin. This was a tender exploration of what it might be like to be an alien who steals the souls of humans, whilst also falling in love with the species on which they predate.
So it is possible that The Zone of Interest might not be Glazer’s very finest work, but it certainly is a significant artistic force to be reckoned with. Indeed a close friend of mine said that she found it difficult to sleep for two days after watching it. This is a reaction you will come to understand if you catch The Zone of Interest this weekend. It sets out to both capture and to terrorise the viewer and gives little by way of quarter.
A Modernist Bio-Pic
The Zone of Interest, I’d suggest, is best understood as a modernist bio-pic, more of a cinepoem than a conventional historical drama. It employs a variety of aesthetic modes, including symbolic naturalism and expressionism, as well as anti-realist distanciation. It also departs from the conventional Hollywood narrative structure, using a far narrower emotional register than is normal, whilst rejecting elements of the classical three act structure. All of this means that the film puts us, the spectators, under pressure. We are not meant to simply ‘enjoy’ this film.
Glazer's picture dramatises the story of Rudolf Höss, who is played with extraordinary strength by the very talented Christian Friedel. For those who don’t know this grim but true German tale, Höss was a high ranking German SS officer and the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp at which close to a million Jews and other enemies of the Nazi’s were slaughtered.
So Höss’ made his mark on history as a methodical butcher of human beings, in a German state operation that ended with the Nazi Final Solution. He was hanged by the Polish authorities on the 16th April 1947, at the age 45, after he completed his memoirs and was convicted in a public trial for his crimes against Jewish people and humanity more broadly.
Glazer, I’d suggest, offers us a deeply personal take on this story. He spent many, many years developing this project and it is important to recognise that he approaches his work as a seasoned auteur, not a genre director. This film itself has some similarities with Under the Skin, in so far as the director’s concern is with the boundary between the human and inhuman.
In Under the Skin we watch a predatory alien trying to understand, and perhaps also become, a human. The Zone of Interest presents a similar puzzle. The Nazi protagonist we are introduced to at the start is initially presented as a loving father and a kind husband, but most of us watch him being a ‘good’ father and husband with a knowledge of the actual historical narrative. Glazer’s presentation is therefore ironic, and deeply uncomfortable, as we know that a man who is apparently good in his private life is also delivering the Holocaust. The question this film presents is: how could one man combine ordinary humanity with extraordinary inhumanity?
Glazer suggests some answers, but because he has made an art film and not a mainstream realist historical drama, or a piece of Marxist agitprop, these are suggestive. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil is clearly one influence on his thinking, as Höss does not act like an ideological firebrand and if anything he is a careerist. But the leading concept within the drama is, I think, dehumanisation. In particular, Glazer’s film explores how racism, notions of racial supremacy and fears over racial contamination meant that many Germans came to see Jews as a monstrous and inhuman threat.
So the key point Glazer appears to be making is that Höss does not recognise Jews as humans. This is mirrored in the form of the story itself, as we mostly don't see the Jews and others that Höss is exterminating. Visually the victims of the Holocaust are nearly entirely excluded from the cinematic frame and more broadly they are excluded from the narrative as active agents.
Here Glazer, I believe, makes a move that is radically humanist at two levels. First, the exclusion of the victims forces us to engage with the perspective of the human monster Höss. Mostly we see events as a close observer of his perspective. Secondly, Glazer chooses to not deny Höss his own humanity, which is revealed in his actions as a father and a husband and in the very final moments of the film in a scene which I will not describe for the benefit of those who are yet to watch it.
As such, Glazer’s approach is similar to that of England’s greatest ever commercial and sometimes also modernist filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock. Like Hitchcock’s great late period works, such as Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964), Glazer’s film is deeply unsettling because it humanises the monster. Here Glazer like Hitchcock works with the ancient dictum: nothing human is alien to me. More specifically, he proposes that the inhumanity of the monster derives from its failure to recognise the humanity of others.
However, Glazer's framing of the story does not mean that Jews are not present. As I have suggested, the opening sections of the film include a series of beautifully composed scenes which focus on the family life of Höss. As the film progresses, we begin to hear the suffering of the Jewish inmates and others, in off screen space, the use of which is common in horror films. In these scenes, Glazer juxtaposes Höss’ ordinary and even charming middle class German family life with a diabolical background. At the front we see the Höss family going about their daily business in a house that is located immediately outside of the death camp in a space that the Nazis designated “the zone of interest”. This was a space outside of the camps where access was restricted in order to hide the activities within. These scenes of family life would be appealing, were it not for our knowledge of what is happening beyond. As the Höss children play, and their mother prunes the garden bushes, and the family dog is petted and looked after, the human slaughterhouse looms. Evil in this film coexists with the banal and the beautiful.
As I hope I have made clear, the strategy Glazer employs creates an emotional dissonance within the spectator, which explains why my friend could not sleep. Further, Glazer augments his visual composition with a powerful score, the use of which evidences a debt to Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining (1980), as do the final concluding scenes in terms of visual design. The score used by Glazer, much like that used by Kubrick, is also modernist, with minimal discordant melodies, including a distressed voice-like chorus and rough and intrusive synthesiser notes, all of which signal our collective sense of impotence and dread.
Inside the Nazi Mind
Overall, I would suggest that Glazer’s approach is one that focuses our attention on what he imagines to be the psychology of Höss and his type. He shows him going about the task of mass murder in a routine, sometimes excited fashion, whilst living his ‘best’ German life. He simply does not see things with the horror that we do, but because he is presented to us as a human we also yearn for his redemption, or just punishment. Both are denied to us.
Understandably, some might find Glazer’s approach to be a touch perverse. It is reasonable to ask why Glazer decided for the most part to exclude the actual victims of the historical scene, as well as its heroes. Glazer might have instead raised our spirits by telling us the story of the valiant Jewish resistance both within and beyond the camp. He might have retold the true tale of another friend's father, a brave Jewish Polish partisan who risked all to fight the Nazis from the forests throughout the war. But Glazer tells the story he chooses, as he must, and film critics ought to begin from a position of respect for the decisions of the artist.
It is also entirely reasonable to ask why Glazer chose to humanise a man whose actions could not have been more inhuman. Is Glazer equivocating on a clear example of evil? I don’t think so, the true horror of Höss is precisely the fact that he was a human. Glazer is not trying to make us all feel good about ourselves.
As I have suggested, much of the criticism of this film has been poorly aimed, but especially the judgement that it is dramatically monotonous, or that it was made in bad taste. This first of these criticisms contains a half truth, but the second strikes me as well wide of the mark. Addressing these criticisms might help us to further understand the brilliance of this film.
A Tiresome Tale?
One strand of the negative critical responses to this film has objected to Glazer’s intentional rejection of the narrative conventions of Hollywood, in particular its preference for stories with a wide emotional range, as well as a classical three act structure that ends in a form of closure and often redemption.
Principally, Hollywood narratives will feature a range of emotions, so that each emotion is more obviously felt, whilst a clear resolve is employed so that spectators leave a film feeling both satisfied and secure.
But whilst it might be right to observe that Glazer departs from these narrative orthodoxies, it is, in my view, wrong to declare that he does so in error.
The Zone of Interest does indeed have a narrow and unpleasant emotional range. There is, for example, little or no comedy. I counted only one joke in the entire film and this was darker than death itself. Toward the end of the film Höss gets carried away with his success and imagines gassing the section of the Nazi leadership that helped plan The Final Solution. This joke aside, the film overall does feel emotionally monotonous, but it might be more accurate to say that it is gruelling, which to me seems apt given its content.
Similarly, it is also true that The Zone of Interest ends abruptly, before everything that is set up has been brought to close. Here again the film departs from the approach that is typical of Hollywood. If this had been a Hollywood film it might ended with the scouts of 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army approaching the gates of Auschwitz. But in this film Glazer does not offer us a close such as this because he believes that dehumanisation remains a threat to our collective humanity.
So Glazer’s narrative decisions, it seems to me, are not the errors of an amateur. In fact, it is his critics that are in error. Instead of disputing his narrative structure, they should instead be asking if it serves his artistic aims. In my view, it does, as Glazer’s does not intend to offer us a tidy, psychologically pleasing story. Rather, he sets up a historical injustice that cannot be unmade, so that we emotionally confront what dehumanisation means. Here I believe he intends to focus our attention on today. Never again, right?
Fair Alexandria Redeems Us
However, it is important to note that there is some redemption in the story. This is provided by scenes which are based on a true story of a brave twelve year old Polish girl who lived near the camp. She is introduced to us whilst Höss’ is reading his children the story of Hansel and Gretel. Our Gretel, who was in real life called Alexandria, and who Glazer met as an adult whilst making the film, is seen in the film engaging in a daring act of resistance. This involves scattering apples and pears in the work areas of Auschwitz at night, so that the inmates, who were being starved, might eat. Glazer shoots these scenes using a reverse black and white thermal camera, which gives our character a mythic, almost divine feel, as if she were a youthful cosmic force for good in an otherwise dark hellscape.
During one of her night missions the young woman finds a tin. This contains a song which has been written by a Jewish inmate. Again this is based on a true story. The inmate who wrote the song was called Joseph Wulf and fortunately he survived. We hear his song in the film. It is called Sunbeams and you can hear Wulf sing it here.
The translated Yiddish lyrics of the song run as follows:
“Sunbeams, radiant and warm. Human bodies, young and old. And who are imprisoned here, our hearts are yet not cold. We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night, souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.”
Too many, of course, never saw this flag.
Contrary to some of his rigid critics, Glazer’s film, we should note, has received fulsome praise from Hollywood’s perhaps most capable practitioner of the conventional three act form: Steven Spielberg. Spielberg of course wowed the world many years ago with his Holocaust film Schindlers’ List (1993). Speaking to the The Hollywood Reported he said that the The Zone of Interest was the “... best Holocaust movie I’ve witnessed since my own. It’s doing a lot of good work in raising awareness, especially about the banality of evil.” So I imagine that Glazer has not lost too much sleep about his narrative structure.
Holokitsch?
Another strand of the more serious criticism of this film has claimed that The Zone of Interest is an example of what some call holokitsch, a bad taste or slight treatment of a story that could not be more grave. One example of holokitsch that is commonly cited is Jo Jo Rabbit (2019). This film really was, in my view, fundamentally facile, but Glazer’s film most certainly is not. It does not trivialise its subject matter, rather it asks a deep question that many of us have pondered: how could a human being do something like this? Glazer’s answer is partly the banality of evil, and it is partly racist dehumanisation. These are two social processes which Glazer, rightly or wrongly, sees as being evident in the world today and in the war he controversially referenced at the Oscars.
Overall, I’d suggest that Glazer’s film should be taken seriously. He chooses to depart from historical realism and does not offer us the range of emotions that we have come to expect from a Hollywood film. His film frustrates our desire for a simple life affirming resolution. As such, it is remarkably similar to Martin Scorsese’s equally excellent Oscar contender Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). You can read my review here.
Like Scorsese’s film, Glazer’s The Zone of Interest also employs modernist anti-realist distanciation strategies, which take us beyond simple narrative immersion and into a different cinematic space. One example of this comes towards the end. Here we experience a stark and unanticipated cut to the actual Auschwitz memorial of today, which we see being respectfully maintained by its Polish guardians. The point Glazer is making at this point, I believe, is that the drama we have witnessed is in fact real and humanity failed to stop the Holocaust. Glazer himself has said the he was inspired to make this film because he felt that the world was becoming a darker place, which is a claim that in general terms I find hard to refute. This film was clearly conceived as a call to action.
Criticism Should Begin with the Artist and Not the Critic
The job of the film critic, in my view, isn’t to impose their own aesthetic and political preferences on the artist. Indeed, if the critic had artistic talent, they would be making films themselves. Rather, the job of the critic, I believe, is to judge the artist by the standards they have set themselves. If there is a serious critique to be written of a serious film, then it should first be immanent, by which I mean it should try to judge the work of art in its own terms. Much of the criticism of The Zone of Interest that I have read crosses this critical line and sets out to tell Glazer what type of film he ought to have made. This is, I believe, deeply arrogant.
Why You Ought to Watch It
It seems clear to me that with The Zone of Interest Glazer most certainly did not set out to make standard issue historical drama that follows the norms of mainstream Hollywood. He rejects the redemptive three act structure and does not provide us with any simple, or trite, answers to the complex questions his work poses. He film also rejects straightforward narrative immersion and challenges us to think about ourselves and the world for which we are responsible.
Ultimately, what Glazer does do, it seems to me, is to explore his own feelings in relation to our historical sitter. In doing so, he draws in part on the initial work of Martin Amis, whose novel Glazer adapted for this film, as well as other available biographical evidence, which includes psychological reports that were prepared as part of the Höss trial. The actual Höss described in these reports seems very close to the Höss depicted in the film: withdrawn and nearly dissociated from himself. Ultimately a conformist.
So Glazer’s film is finally his personal take. It is a serious modernist cinepoem, one which is intentionally difficult to watch. My conclusion is that Glazer is not seeking to diminish the horror of what we witness and this film is not the work of an amateur or an example of holokitsch. I'd stay that Glazer has stuck to his humanist dramatic guns and I for one admire him for that.
Glazer rightly holds our eyes to the moral and political firestorm that was German Nazi Final Solution and he is mostly unremitting in his grip. He also chooses to not deny us the complex if also repugnant humanity of his monster protagonist. Critically, he also adopts a form that forces us to confront the present. He asks of us: who are you? do you recognise others? and what are you prepared to do to confront the darkness of today?
Glazer comments at the Oscars have provoked significant ire and applause. But you don't have to agree with Glazer’s politics to appreciate the brilliance of The Zone of Interest. His film stands up on its own. But to judge it, you must first go and see it. It deserves to be watched on a big screen, with your phone switched off, in the company of strangers. This is a portrait that has been painted with passion, and like all great portraits it tells us as much about the painter as it does the sitter.
Thank you for your work Jonathan.
Pictures courtesy of A24 films.