THE ZONE OF INTEREST Review

"Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good." — Martin Luther King Jr.

A father and his family in Poland (and the banality of evil). His job as an officer of the state (and the bureaucracy of extermination). Their house and it's beautiful gardens (and the efficiency of clockwise death versus that of shutting down the house before bed).

Such an audacious swing from Glazer. Filtering history through a voyeuristic and Big Brother camera, while the film itself lies in the ear's sense. Dogs barking, screams heard, trains arriving. A tale of a family operating as such, where their lives are a story operating in the thematic foreground and background at once. Where the ambient noise of a death camp while your kids eat supper becomes an auditory parallel to a cocktail party's clinks and laughs for a golden age of malevolence. Glazer's mixture of the essential messages here is microscope-precise, with the coda's final combination slicing into that part of your brain where things easily ignored and never forgotten go.

He saves his biggest punches for your ears, but the camera is barely behind. The blue sky a constant multi-layered story, a wife in stolen mink, bloody boots after a day's work, gold teeth in a child's bed, a grandmother behind curtains lit hellred. The Zone of Interest overloads your processing. It's a "quiet" film that never lets you get your bearings. A gluttonous feeding of the senses, with each successive dish a darker shade of evil.

"Will you take me to that spa in Italy again?" Mrs. Höss asks before laughing in bed, as gunshots ring out over barbed walls. A hard cut to Mr. as smoke plumes and mayhem surrounds, his face that of a man watching ducks swim in the park. Later, after a separate personal affront, Mrs. Höss says to a house servant, "I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice."

I agree with Dr. King on the first part.

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The above was taken from my Letterboxd review.