Movie Review: The Zone of Interest

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A+

An incredible powerful and disturbing movie.

This film involves a family living next door to a concentration camp (where the father and husband works) in Nazi Germany. We never see the inside of this concentration camp, but we hear the horrifying sounds as we watch this family. There is no big story line here instead, we simply watch this family live their lives. However, that is just what makes his movie so powerful and disturbing. The characters don't comment or pay much attention to the horrifying screams and other sounds coming from next door. They simply continue living their lives (down to the most mundane things) without any notice. The kids have a pool party, the family eats dinner together, the parents bicker over mundane things and the kids play with their toys. At one point a couple of characters are having a conversation and it is interrupted by screaming for next door. After the screaming finishes the conversation just continues like before. The very idea that anyone could simply live a normal life without even reacting to the atrocities that surround them seems confounding to us. While most films that simply focus on people simply living their lives, does so to humanize its characters, this film has a very different effect. It both humanizes and dehumanizes these characters. While this focus on the mundane makes the characters feel more real, there is only so much you can humanize them. This is because it is simply inhuman to be immune to such atrocities. 

This film is never a comfortable watch. While this is an incredible movie, it is never what one might call enjoyable. I can't think of another movie that has ever made me quite this uncomfortable. This movie is so unique and powerful that you leave the theatre still in emotional shock over what you just watched. I sat watching the credits quiet and still being overwhelmed by the sheer angry, sadness, discomfort and many complex emotions I felt. As I am writing this review, I still find myself powerfully effected by what I just saw.

 Director Jonathan Glazer stated about this movie, “This is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims." While we are horrified by this movie, when we turn a blind eye to the injustice and atrocities committed in this world is not dissimilar to what is happening here. It is very true that these situations are in many ways far from the same, but this film cause us to look inside of ourselves and whenever we have turned a blind eye to the horrors that take place in our world. This makes the movie all the more powerful and chilling. What is more horrifying is the thought that there may never be a time when that message is not relevant.   

This is the type of film that you will leave not being the same as when came into the theater.