Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Stuns Cannes

I‘ve had a very good feeling about Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” for a few months now. It turns out that it’s now become the most acclaimed film so far at this year’s Cannes, and an automatic Palme d’Or contender.

First things first, this is an iced art film, through and through. There’s no other way to put it. It's a meticulously delivered and minimalist 104-minute film — a masterfully constructed treatise on the banality of evil. It does however leave you feeling very detached and cold. It’s basically an anti-drama.

The film opens with a 3-minute overture in total darkness and ends with a stunner of a scene. Mica Levi’s score is also astonishingly bleak in its thumping simplicity. I can’t imagine the film being as effective without Levi’s handprint on it.

Set during the early years of WWII, the film is almost exclusively set at the home of the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, following his family who, incredibly, live right next door to a concentration camp. Consider the scene where they swim in their outdoor pool as screams of horror are heard in the background. The Höss’ don’t even flinch, they’re having too much fun in the water.

All throughout the film you watch the Höss family, his wife and 5 kids, perform mundane tasks at their home all while cries and gunshots can be heard far away outside in the far background. They seem completely unaffected by it.

The film is almost exclusively composed of wide shots, the camera always far away from its subjects. It feels as though a lot of thought and purpose was put into each and every frame by Glazer. It’s almost Kubrickian in its obsessive attention to detail.

Michael Haneke once stated that Hollywood never got the holocaust right on-screen. I do wonder how he would feel about Glazer’s artfully austere approach. What Glazer has proven here is that there are new ways to tell the story of the holocaust.

I’m not ready to share more thoughts just yet, I’ll be watching it again tomorrow morning.