The Zone of Interest

 So, it's finally happened.

The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer's adaptation of the recently deceased Martin Amis's novel, has finally come to streaming. It's only available for purchase, which I did for $19.99 on Amazon. That's not a bad price for a Blu-Ray, but this isn't an easy film to sit through, nor is it easy to think about.

Right off the bat, I must comment on the much-hyped Oscar-nominated and now, BAFTA-winning, sound mix. The film is primarily centered around the humble home of our protagonists, Rudolf (Christien Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller). They raise their kids, hold parties, and live their daily lives. But we hear something going on all throughout the movie. There are the occasional gunshots, dogs barking, people shouting, trains whistling, furnaces churning, and perhaps most disturbingly of all, screams that blend together into a raging torrent. Mica Levi's droning score sometimes doesn't register as music, and you're not sure what it is instead. Whatever's going on back there, you'd have to be really brave, naive, or heartless, to mind it. That's a point the sound mix makes perfectly well.

The something that's going on back there is Auschwitz. Rudolf is Rudolf Hoss, the camp's commandant, who lives next door to the Nazi death machine with his family. Rudolf still tries to raise his kids like any normal parent would. Hedwig and her friends occasionally relish in the goods the Nazis snatch from Jewish prisoners. Their idyllic family life is disrupted when Rudolf is promoted to deputy camp inspector. This requires Rudolf to transfer to Oranienberg, near Berlin, though Hedwig wishes to stay put in her current home. Oh, pity her. (That was sarcasm).

This is perhaps the most shocking slice-of-life story you'll ever see. Huller's performance as Hedwig is its greatest centerpiece. In one scene, Hedwig and her mother, Linna (Imogen Kogge), have a nice conversation. Linna is proud of the good life Hedwig and Rudolf have made. Hedwig proudly proclaiming herself "The Queen of Auschwitz" in that scene is perfectly revolting. Hedwig also mistreats her housemaid, Aniela (Zuzanna Kobiela), even threatening to have Rudolf incinerate her. She's a loving mother, yes, but casually evil to just about anyone else. Linna, for her part, is actually shocked once she gets a glimpse of the Nazi death machine. The film doesn't take us inside Auschwitz, other than in an epilogue set long after the war, but we and she see smoke rise from the crematorium. Need I say more?

We now get to Rudolf. I'd hesitate to call him sympathetic, but he has a few humanizing moments here and there. He's quite outraged when the ashes of murdered prisoners wash into a river that he and his kids were swimming in. Later on, he meets and pets a schnauzer getting walked in Berlin. But this is a man who mistreats his prisoners, and I don't just mean having them killed, and imagines gassing a party of loyalists at the end. The ending is made all the more ambiguous knowing that the real life Rudolf pretty much repented just before his execution in 1947. Is he sickened by the evil he caused? Does he feel powerless to escape his current path? Or is it something else?

The film's BAFTA-nominated production designer and cinematographer, Chris Oddy and Łukasz Żal, perfectly visualize its casually bleak tone. The Hoss House is splendid, that's for sure, but the pleasantness is eradicated by the background noise. It gets pretty surreal once we meet a minor character, Aleksandra (Julia Polaczek), who leaves food at night for the prisoners. The sudden shift to night-vision for her scenes is a jarring one, for sure. Its most memorable scene, visually, might be its last, when Rudolf finds himself alone in a darkened, gray hallway. After the aforementioned epilogue, Rudolf walks down the stairwell, perhaps resigned to his dark path. That's a scene that'll stick with you for a long time.

The Zone of Interest represents the United Kingdom in the International Feature Oscar race. It's also the inevitable winner considering it's also nominated for Best Picture, among other awards. This is a film that forces its audience to reflect on their own humanity as it denounces its villain protagonists' inhumanity. All it needs to do is to show them live their lives. It doesn't need to do much to say much. It's quite a profound film, but it's not really an easy film to sit through. It's a bit over two weeks before the Oscars, and if you want to see it before then, see it however you can. It took this long before it became accessible to me at all. Maybe you'll be lucky to already have it playing theatrically nearby. Maybe.