The Genocide Next Door ‘The Zone of Interest’ is the greatest Holocaust movie ever made Just when you thought there was nothing more to say about the Holocaust, along comes ‘The Zone of Interest,’ Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant, disturbing film based on a 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. Unlike ‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘The Pianist,’ and other big, melodramatic treatments of Hitler’s genocide, the movie has no pathos and no hope or sense of survival or endurance. In fact, it doesn’t depict the Holocaust head-on at all. Nearly the entire film takes place in a charming upper-middle-class suburban house that just happens to be the residence of Rodolf Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, and his happy little Aryan family. THE ZONE OF INTEREST ★★★★★ (5/5 stars) Directed by: Jonathan Glazer Written by: Jonathan Glazer, Martin Amis Starring: Christian Friedrich, Sandra Hüller Running time: 105 mins Hoss, played with chilling restraint by Christian Friedrich, is an amoral technocrat and a workaholic who only occasionally has late-night dalliances with local women in his private office. He goes about his business ordering new crematorium technologies like a factory-owner looking for a more efficient way to produce widgets. The movie takes place on the verge of the Final Solution, and Hoss is very concerned with ramping up “production,” as he calls it. But in some ways, his wife, Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller, recently seen in Anatomy of a Fall, is an even bigger monster. Hedwig, “the Queen of Auschwitz,” is a working-class woman who the Holocaust has made rich. When her mother comes to visit, she mentions that she used to be a charwoman for a rich Jewish family. While Rodolf rides his beloved horse into the concentration camp every day and occasionally travels back to Germany for business trips, Hedwig is busy building her dream house right next door to Auschwitz. Her children frolic in the swimming pool and back yard while people scream and shots fire right beyond the barbed-wire wall. Hüller waddles around the house in her stocking feet, trying on the fur coats of slaughtered Jews and berating her servants. Gardeners tend her vegetables and flowers, fertilizing them with ash from the human ovens. Her oldest son, who goes off to school in a Hitler Youth costume, plays with gold teeth from discarded Jews in bed. When her mother, visiting from the city, has a pang of conscience at seeing the crematorium flames from her bedroom, she bails at dawn, leaving a note, which Hedwig throws in a furnace, berates a servant, and goes about eating her eggs and sausage. At a certain point, when Rodolf gets the message that he is to be in charge of the logistics for the entire Final Solution across all concentration camps, Hedwig throws an absolute snit that she might have to leave their little idyll next door to the most complete and evil mass murder in human history. It is the perfect distillation of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” There are no people more banal than the Hoss family, building their happy, healthy dream life on the bones of millions. Glazer is largely a music video director for acts like Radiohead and Nick Cave. His four-film career includes the fun gangster genre picture Sexy Beast and the creepy and affective sci-fi horror movie Under the Skin. The Zone of Interest is his first feature in a decade, and it is certainly his best among an impressive filmography. It may be the best movie of the last year, and one of the best in many years. He focuses on the boring details of the Hoss family life for minutes at a time, mixing in steady and tracking shots, backed by a soundtrack of discordant music and the ambient noise of the churning Auschwitz furnace next door. It is brilliant and morally unflinching. The film only briefly leaves the despicable world of the Hoss family. There’s a sequence of a Polish girl picking through the Auschwitz rubble, where she finds sheet music written by a murdered soul. She takes it home and plays it in a quiet elegy. And then there’s a heartbreaking sequence toward the end that cuts to the present day where we see people cleaning Auschwitz, which is now a horrifying museum commemorating all the dead souls. We see the discarded suitcases and shoes, and it makes it very clear that Rodolf Hoss, our sort-of devoted family man, is one of the greatest mass murderers of history, and that the Queen of Auschwitz was a vampire. The Hoss family may sleep well at night, but you definitely won’t after seeing this brilliant, chilling movie.
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