#TIFF23 Review: The Zone of Interest (Special Presentations)

By John Corrado

★★★★ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes), is a transcendent meditation on the capacity for regular people to carry out despicable acts, offering an artful adaptation of the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis.

The film focuses on the domestic life of high-ranking Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who are raising their young kids at a state-provided home near the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. The children play in the yard, and the family hosts dinner parties. But smokestacks spewing thick smoke from the Jewish bodies being incinerated linger in the background, and reminders of the death all around them keep intruding on their seemingly idyllic world.

The film mostly unfolds through static long shots, showing the family enjoying the lush garden or getting ready for bed. In these dioramas of German life unfolding normally in the shadow of Auschwitz, Glazer offers an uncomfortable, deeply unsettling portrait of the banality of evil. What makes Glazer’s vision so chilling is the harsh juxtaposition of how unassuming it often feels. The characters are simply going about their lives, but they are evil people.

There is no plausible deniability; they are not only completely aware of what is going on around them, but complicit in it. Rudolf goes over the blueprints for a new incinerator, discussing its ability to more efficiently handle 400-500 bodies at a time. He is proud of his work and obsesses over keeping his job and impressing his (unseen) boss, Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, his wife Hedwig just wants to maintain her affluent lifestyle and hold on to their nice house, bragging with other women about what items they have gotten from the raided Jewish homes.

Rudolf is a complete psychopath, but he is also no cartoon villain, which makes Friedel’s portrayal all the more fascinating and unsettling (there is no Taika Waititi here offering a comic variation on Hitler to soften the film’s blows). Glazer makes us acutely aware of his responsibility in helping carry out the atrocities at Auschwitz, but he comes across as a regular person; a husband and a father.

As a Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest is a unique, disturbing, and hard to shake experience. Glazer’s filmmaking feels both artistic and excitingly experimental at times. There are nighttime interludes shot in infrared that have a fairy tale quality to them. He holds on beautiful shots of the garden as we hear muffled screams and gunshots in the background. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal (whose work on Cold War feels like another reference point for the film) is often stunning, and the film is sparsely but effectively scored by composer Mica Levi.