Zone of Interest Review: In the Garden of ‘See No Evil’
Jonathan Glazer’s domestic portrait—set next door to a concentration camp—may be the most frightening film of the year.
Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) in her tidy garden, which abuts the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Source: A24
The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s Under the Skin, is easily one of the most disturbing movies you’ll ever see. Once again, the writer-director challenges us to look at films—and the world—from an unexpected and uncomfortable perspective. If his work is going to continue to be this brilliant and unsettling, I suppose it’s worth waiting a decade between movies.
The film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes before going on to wow audiences at the Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals, is an almost clinical analysis of the mundane nature of evil. Glazer gives us a year in the life of a striving middle manager (Christian Friedel) and his nouveau riche wife (Sandra Hüller), setting his tale in and around their lovely garden. Here’s the catch: Our young exec is SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and the small paradise his wife, Hedwig, has built is in the Zone of Interest, as the Nazis dubbed the death camp’s restricted surroundings.