Spoilers below.
Tyler: Norman, we’ve come to another Oscar hopeful, and there’s very little hopeful about it. The Zone Of Interest, filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s first release in many years, concerns the Holocaust. The idea of a “Holocaust movie” is by now, 2024, a tried cinematic staple. There have been exceptional works onscreen; there have been poor ones.
The Zone Of Interest is exceptional.
Norman: What makes it exceptional (or maybe objectionable, depending on your perspective), is that it’s a Holocaust movie that is sort of not about the Holocaust. This movie is the anti-Schindler’s List. A movie that doesn’t look directly at the horror, but instead looks just to the right, where people are willfully ignoring the terror going on right next door.
Tyler: They willfully ignore it, but they also celebrate it. Old and young.
Norman: Yes!
The Zone of Interest is an EXPERIENCE.
Tyler: My struggle over whether to buy theater popcorn was real. I thought about it ahead of time. “I love my movie popcorn. But, really, is this right?” I eventually caved and bought a tub. Waste of money. I gave up when we got to the older of the two brothers playfully counting golden teeth.
Norman: I politely told the art house concession guy that I was fine, thank you.
Okay, so I actually want to ask you about the opening. Did you know that we’d be treated to a few minutes of a dark screen with Mica Levi’s haunting score? I was not prepared and I wondered if there was something wrong with the projection.
Tyler: I had no idea about anything other than Glazer’s stewardship and the subject matter in general. I guess, having seen Under The Skin, I was prepared for abstraction, but yeah, the length of that darkness was almost concerning.
Maybe not concerning. Disorienting.
Norman: It does something that was helpful to me. It forced me to pay close attention to sounds right away.
Tyler: Good point.
The soundscape here. I mean…
Norman: It is the movie.
This is what I mean by an EXPERIENCE. It’s rare that I sit through a movie and feel as though I have been subjected to something, but in this case, the film’s sound design was so unrelenting. The only thing I could relate it to is the experience of having a newborn baby that won’t stop crying.
The sound of the baby will just flood your environment, taking it over. In my experience, you can’t concentrate, your stress levels spike, and you feel completely helpless. That was most of Zone of Interest for me.
Tyler: On occasion—and this is scarcely a criticism, rather an inadvertent social lament—I wondered whether the depiction was too obtuse. “That only horrifies us if we know this, that or the other about the Holocaust.” But, I self-corrected: it’s human history, and we all damn well better know about it.
Norman: This would not be the movie I’d show someone if they had never learned about the Holocaust. Once you’ve learned about it in history class, you should be able to go into Zone of Interest knowing only that it’s about a Nazi commandant and his family as they live next to Auschwitz.
Tyler: Man, it is a criminal understatement to say that Zone Of Interest unsettled me.
Norman: Unsettling is the right word. I felt jarred.
Tyler: Shaken.
There are moments throughout that one would think cannot be outdone in terms of visceral mortifying effect. Yet the velocity does increase. This is a structured film.
“Sweaty.” My God.
Norman: The moments that stick out to me the most are ones in which people are playing or doing work. I can’t bring myself to fathom how you would get to a point where that noise – the noise of death and torture – would wash over you like a gentle ocean wave. But obviously people did this, they lived right next to a human slaughterhouse, and wanted to live there!
Tyler: And the kids, the children. That noise inspires them.
When I realized off the horrifying “Sss. Sss.” what the kids were getting up to with the greenhouse…
Norman: That’s easier for me to understand. Kids just pick up on whatever is around them. They habituate. But adults should know better.
Tyler: Don’t they, though? Both the parents in this family know full well the extent of what’s going on behind that wall. They joke about it, or use it as weaponry when berating the help.
There’s a depth of evil here that…I don’t know, perhaps I haven’t known since I saw Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. Zone Of Interest has those tiny brushstrokes of hyper-realism. In a conventional film, the horrid inherit a pilfered diamond. In Zone Of Interest, the diamond’s in the toothpaste.
Norman: The level of evil is incredible. Which is why I keep coming back to the lengths someone would have to go through, mentally disassociate.
In trying to maintain this bucolic lifestyle, you have to ignore the biohazard coming down the river you are trying to fish in. You have to hear screams over the wall and convince yourself that those aren’t human screams. You have to bend yourself out of shape to a degree that I find difficult to imagine.
Tyler: Well, we have a single unexpected outlier. The grandmother. What did you think of that, the decision to include a character who does find herself affected by what she hears and sees?
Norman: It’s a nice contrast to the wife, who wants to stay even as her husband is transferred elsewhere.
I think the movie needs that to alleviate some of the tension that an audience might feel. And Glazer doesn’t stage that sequence as a moment of triumph.
Tyler: Definitely not. She gets an easy out, the grandmother.
We haven’t even touched on the night-vision-esque sequences.
Norman: I still need to think about those sequences. They pulled me out of the movie. I felt disoriented more anything. I love Glazer’s willingness to push boundaries, but I’m not sure those scenes worked for me. How about you?
Tyler: Well, when a movie—or album, for that matter—has me truly captivated, my instinct is to presume any perceived missteps are actually my problem, me misunderstanding brilliance. I respect so much of Zone Of Interest, that I automatically trust that those scenes work. I just don’t get it yet.
That’s where I’m at. Glazer is, I dunno, spinning a thread of Grimm’s-fairytale humanity? Normally, I’d say, “I’ll check that out on second viewing.” But, do I really need to see Zone Of Interest ever again?
Norman: It’s a movie I might show my kids or a friend one day if they’ve never seen it, but it’s really not something you want to see again. And I don’t know if I would need to. The memory of this one will stay with me, I’m sure.
Tyler: It’s all pretty arbitrary, but it feels odd to think of this as Best Picture material. Most Important, maybe. I can’t see it beating Oppenheimer, which is already pretty out there.
Norman: I’m glad it was nominated, though. Movie geeks of the future will look it up because of this nomination. As they should.
But, yeah. It’s hard to compare something like this to Barbie or The Holdovers. I like both of those movies a great deal, but they are not the same.
Tyler: The Zone Of Interest deserves all the attention it’s getting. Everybody should see it once.
Norman: And only once.
Tyler: Yeah, really. But, hey, people adore Requiem For A Dream. They return to it. That’s not to pick on Requiem For A Dream, a film I’ve never once sat down and consumed—precisely because I’ve been cautioned about the horror depicted, by people who had seen the movie about a hundred times each. There will be an audience that turns Zone Of Interest into repeat viewing.
Norman: I’ve seen Requiem for a Dream twice. One more time than I needed to. Great movie, though.
What else have you seen by Jonathan Glazer? I’ve seen Under the Skin, which was also a singular experience. I’m going to try Sexy Beast tomorrow.
Tyler: Under The Skin is wild. I recall enjoying Kingsley in Sexy Beast, and I think I’d like the film even more now at this point in life. I never came close to Birth.
I dunno, Norman, I’m a bit in awe of Zone Of Interest.
How difficult and grueling this work must have been.
Norman: Similarly impressed over here. I’m taken with Glazer’s restraint and his willingness to trust the audience.
It takes some guts to open your movie with two minutes of music. It takes a lot of self-control to keep a lot of that music out of the body of the film. Holocaust movies are often Oscar-bait, and Glazer could have made one of those. But The Zone of Interest transcends those categories.
Tyler: Yes. It’s a grim rave from both of us. The Zone Of Interest. See it, once.
Writers' Loom 