Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” combats the complacency that governs how we often watch prestige movies, particularly those concerned with true-life savagery. Glazer wants to make the Holocaust ugly and hellish and unholy and alien and boring and commonplace and alive right now, rather than relegating it to a lesson that we must learn in theaters playing movies angling for awards. Glazer aims to honor the magnitude of the Holocaust, which he achieves by leaning full-tilt into the conventions of prestige cinema before brutally upending them. It’s a stunt that’s been made with uncommonly powerful, insinuating skill. In other words, it’s art.
“The Zone of Interest” has the forbiddingly high-brow tone that is often irresistible to critics and Oscars (true to form, the film recently snagged many nominations). The camera often regards the characters from a distance, in the sort of neutral, arty compositions that one encounters in many acclaimed European films. Scenes unfold at a stately pace, though they are strangely arresting. The first proper scene finds a family sprawled out and picnicking by a river before marching as a processional through the nearby woods toward their home. The beauty of the country is shocking in this context, giving the film the aura of a fairy tale or an Ingmar Bergman production.
Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), who was a real person, is the commandant of the concentration camp in Auschwitz, and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), spends her days ruling over her Jewish servants with her petty tyrannies. In one of the film’s central sequences, we see Hedwig walking her mother through her elaborate garden in a series of tracking shots. Glazer frames the scene so that we are conscious of the horizontal dimension of the landscape, tracking them laterally from their side as they walk, like a surveillance camera might. We could be looking at them as an exhibit in a museum: “Complicity in the Garden of Sunny and Evil,” perhaps. Something about this and other sequences may make you conscious of yourself as a viewer. It’s as if we’re aliens watching a dissertation on human cruelty. “The Zone of Interest” suggests one of those “Twilight Zone” episodes where the comfortable suburb is revealed to be a zoo.
As we watch the garden, we notice Auschwitz behind the wall, the curved, barbed spears of the fence spiking up above the greenery. Glazer has the skill to allow us to feel as if we’re noticing it for ourselves. Gun shots are heard in the distance, as they are throughout the movie. Glazer creates a space in which you become used to the gunshots, becoming active yourself in this narrative of complacency. In this film, Auschwitz is always with us and not with us at once —a prison-scape in the background that’s easy to ignore. The camera and the ladies’ chitchat lull us. Without our noticing, the camera has taken us back to the beginning of the garden, doing a quick, intricate lap of luxury that’s parallel to an inferno.
Glazer seduces us with domestic scenes only to underscore the perversity hidden in plain sight. Hedwig tries on a fur coat, which we may think nothing of until it becomes evident that it belonged to someone now in Auschwitz. She pulls used lipstick out of one of the coat’s pockets and begins to use it. Many people have said that the evil of the Holocaust is too epic for us to comprehend. But small actions register, and the callousness that Hedwig displays in applying used lipstick belonging to someone almost certain to die a horrible death, is repulsive. However, Glazer pretends not to editorialize here (at times, he speechifies openly with grisly jokes and poetic flourishes, and the film’s hold momentarily breaks). His refusal to tonally differentiate callousness from cruelty from domestic routine is the entire point of the film. At its most relentlessly understated, “The Zone of Interest” has the blasphemous charge of a Buñuel film.
Glazer has built the film to alienate and seduce us at once. Höss’ attempts to remain at the Auschwitz country home, despite his superiors’ efforts to transfer him elsewhere, suggest the office politics of an executive taken to horrible extremes. This narrative is involving, in part because we are desperate for distraction from the pall of evil that hangs over the movie. But the compositions hold us at a remove. A framing device intensifies this distance, as “The Zone of Interest” opens with a title card accompanied by an aria that suggests a cry of the damned. The title gradually fades as the screen turns to darkness. The impression is that we are being consciously willed from 2024 to a simulacrum of Nazi Germany.
In the moment, this opening seems like effective art theater from the Stanley Kubrick playbook, but its implications are deepened by the sequence in the garden and by a bolder alienation device near the film’s end. Having won back his prized position at Auschwitz, Höss descends a vast stairway of a cold, brutalist Nazi office building. On his way down, he stops and spits up, gagging, not quite vomiting. It is as if he is briefly seeing the magnitude of his evil and is desperate for a purge that will not come. Then he turns to us, and Glazer pulls us back from this simulacrum of the past for a sequence that’s set in Auschwitz in the present day, as cleaners prep it for the morning’s visitors.
Glazer shows us the modern-day exhibits of prisoners’ shoes and belongings. Many of us have seen images like these before. But coming at the end of a movie composed of people who are trapped and living in an illusion, talking glibly of evil, they are unmooring. Then Glazer cuts back to Höss, still looking toward us, as if to ask: “What do you want from me? Are you positive that you would have acted differently in my shoes?”
As a rabid admirer of horror movies, I proudly confess that I am not too good for a hagiographic documentary about Italian maestro Dario Argento. And that’s basically what “Dario Argento Panico” is: a movie that celebrates its subject and plays the hits. If you are predisposed enough towards Argento to watch “Panico” to begin with, you will leave it desperate to re-watch “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” and “Deep Red” and “Tenebrae” and “Opera” and all the other landmarks that he directed before hitting a creative wall sometime in the late 1980s or early ‘90s. “Panico” director Simone Scafidi includes plenty of clips of the movies and of luminaries in talking-head form, celebrating Argento’s pioneering blend of painting, music, and lush fairy tales with slasher-film tropes. But “Panico” still can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity.
Certain talking heads appear to want to say more than is convenient to Scafidi, for one thing. Asia Argento, a famous model and actress who has appeared in several of Dario’s films, clearly has feelings about acting in sexual situations in front of her father, and about his willingness to shut her out of his life for years for the crime of making her own movie. The little that Asia says begs for elaboration, but Scafidi, either out of etiquette or timidity, doesn’t go there. The French filmmaker Gaspar Noé, who directed Dario’s absorbing star turn in “Vortex,” and whose “Climax” suggests a profound understanding of what makes Argento’s movies tick, is also afforded too little room to speak. Though its 97 minutes go down easily, the Argento acolyte may have many such pet peeves.
A larger peeve pertains to how Scafidi sets up a fascinating scenario for a non-fiction film that isn’t allowed to go anywhere. There is footage of Argento, aging, battle worn, traveling to a lux hotel to write a new script. The timeline is fuzzy. Was this the script that would become his recent “Dark Glasses,” or is all of this happening later? Not clear. If Scafidi had simply sat at length with Argento as he discusses his life, perhaps with a gifted collaborator such as Noé, a more revealing and lived-in film than “Panico” may have emerged. Clip shows are fun, but everyone drifting towards ‘Panico” already owns the relevant Blu-rays anyway. We’re devoted.
Nominated for five Oscars, including for Best Picture and Best Director, “The Zone of Interest” is now playing at Movieland. “Dario Argento Panico” is now available to stream on Shudder.
