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ZONE OF INTEREST, BY JONATHAN GLAZER
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Focusing on the everyday domesticity of the Auschwitz commandant's family might only reflect the horror indirectly, but the film pulls the banality of evil into pin-sharp focus.
A single, satanic joke burns through the celluloid in Jonathan Glazer's technically brilliant, uneasy Holocaust movie, freely adapted by the director from the novel by Martin Amis, a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste.
How did the placidly respectable home life of the German people coexist with imagining and executing the horrors of the genocide? How did such evil flower within what George Steiner famously called the German world of "silent night, holy night, gemütlichkeit"?
The film imagines the pure bucolic bliss experienced by Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) who with his family lives in a handsomely appointed family home with servants just outside the barbed-wire-topped wall. His wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) is thrilled with the Edenic "paradise garden" she has been allowed to supervise at the rear, complete with greenhouse: she revels smugly in her unofficial title "Queen of Auschwitz" - and with just that line alone, The Zone of Interest has probably delivered enough nausea for a thousand films.
The Hösses love to go fishing and bathing in the beautiful lakes and streams of the Polish countryside thereabouts, although at one stage Höss discovers what appears to be bone fragments and dark particulate matter in the river that has washed downstream from the camp and curtly orders his children out of the water and back to their lovely home for a wash...
Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
