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Releasing on Dec 8, 2023
- 2023
- A24
- 1 h 45 m
- 2023
- A24
- 1 h 45 m
Summary The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
Directed By: Jonathan Glazer
Written By: Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer
- 2023
- A24
- 1 h 45 m
- 2023
- A24
- 1 h 45 m
The Zone of Interest
User Score
Available after Dec 8, 2023
Summary The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
Directed By: Jonathan Glazer
Written By: Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 23 Critic Reviews
95
96% Positive
22 Reviews
22 Reviews
4% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 23 Critic Reviews
95
96% Positive
22 Reviews
22 Reviews
4% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
This is a challenging and troubling film that asks a lot of the viewer, before sending them away with a great deal to consider. There won’t be many films this year that you’ll turn over more thoroughly in the hours, days, and weeks that follow.
Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.
It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.
It’s a shocking piece of audio-visual art that only further cements Glazer as one of the 21st century’s most original and influential filmmakers.
The Zone of Interest insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
The soundtrack of the Hösses’ daily lives is a reminder of the nightmare taking place just beyond the wall outside their home, and these sounds, relentless in their sense of evocativeness, give an extra layer of the uncanny to Höss’s already unsettling character.
More hollow than hollowing, director Jonathan Glazer’s Edenic nightmare is better when taken metaphorically. There are no people to grasp onto here, only concepts.
User Reviews
tbd
Awards
Cannes Film Festival
• 4 Wins & 5 Nominations
Montclair Film Festival (MFF)
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
Haifa International Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
