From its opening moment, The Zone of Interest teaches us to listen—to bear witness with our ears. As the title fades and a black screen remains, a hollow, ambient fuzz gradually gives way to gentle voices and chirping birds. Eventually images appear: a picturesque scene of a young family picnicking and swimming at a lovely mountain lake. After a time they pack up and return to their home, a well-appointed abode which shares a high wall with the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. The father, you see, is the commandant of the camp, overseeing the genocide underway inside. We never see anything of this horror, but we hear it: frequent screaming, often silenced by a gunshot; the fierce barking of orders; and always, it seems, the low roar of the furnaces in the crematorium. Does the family hear this? That’s the central question of The Zone of Interest, adapted by director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) from a novel by Martin Amis. For awhile it seems that the movie only wants to be an exercise in awful irony—juxtaposing those sickening sounds with the cheerful, willful obliviousness of the commandant (Christian Friedel), his wife (Sandra Huller), and (to a lesser degree) their children, as they share bedtime stories, smell the flowers in their lavish garden, and play with the family dog. But then the movie opens up, adding a few bold formal touches and a new perspective. I won’t spoil that shift, except to note that it gives the film the air of a dark fairy tale. Ultimately, The Zone of Interest demonstrates what it means to have moral vision, to choose to see—or, in this case, hear.
(12/15/2023)
