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THE HORROR, THE HORROR (ZONE OF INTEREST)

© A24 & Film 4

If you love any artform, one of the things you have to resign yourself to is the fact that you're going to miss out on some great works when you die.

You could torture yourself thinking about that but why bother?

It's much better to live in the present and be thankful for all the really great stuff you are exposed to.

Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest' is one such film that makes you glad to be alive.

© A24 & Film 4

Adapted from a 2014 Martin Amis novel, its subject is undoubtedly a hard sell.

'The Zone of Interest' is a Holocaust movie in German about the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss.

However Glazer's film is not like ant Holocaust movie you have ever seen.

It isn't graphic.

© A24 & Film 4

There's no harrowing scenes of terrified Jewish people being rounded up in ghettos, carted off to concentration camps in cramped trains, starved and beaten, shot dead or sent to the gas chambers.

Glazer's film is much more subtle than that.

The horror is deeply psychological.

Instead of subjecting it's audience to harrowing scenes of mass extermination, the focuses on the normalisation by the Nazis of genocide.

© A24 & Film 4

It also zones in on the bureaucracy around it.

Christian Friedel and Sandra Huller are really chilling as Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss who think they are living their best lives while he sends thousands of Jewish people to their deaths in Auschwitz.

After experiencing a black screen in its opening moments and the first few disconcerting bars of Mica Levi's disturbing score, we see Hoss and his family on a day trip away from the concentration camp in sunny meadows and wading in a lake.

Soon the family returns to their comfortable home to celebrate Rudolf's birthday, gifting him a canoe.

© A24 & Film 4

As Rudolf discusses with architects new ways to increase the amount of people going through Auschwitz's incinerators, his family goes about their daily business.

Hedwig carries her baby around a garden that she is immensely proud to smell the rose and lilac bushes.

Angular shots of the family home by Lukasz Zal's camera soon reveal the grim reality that the house has a perimeter wall separating it from the horrors of the concentration camp.

This sets the tone for a jaw dropping film that freuquently tosses into Glazer's mix various images and sounds hinting at the true horror of what is going on in Auschwitz.

© A24 & Film 4

Zal, film editor Paul Watts and sound designers Tarn Willers & Johnnie Burn are critical to the technical excellence of the film.

Their technical brilliance also highlights the appalling normalisation of death in Glazer's film.

As the Hoss family wander around the garden or their house, we hear the sound of gunshots cracking over the wall.

A ride on horseback through fields reveals in the distance smoke bellowing into the sky from Auschwitz's incinerators.

© A24 & Film 4

A family canoe expedition ends abruptly win Hoss realises two of his kids are playing in waters where the skeletons of the dead have been dumped.

As shocking as these noises are, the Hoss family's obliviousness to the slaughter or lack of empathy is chilling.

One of the boys in the famy plays at night with a collection of gold teeth retrieved from victims.

Another plays with tit soldiers in his bedroom while real soldiers torment Jewish victims over the wall.

© A24 & Film 4

Hedwig poses in the mirror in a fur coat presumably taken from a victim and urges her husband to look out for chocolate.

Friedel can feel unlucky not to have made the Best Actor shortlist as a Nazi who takes great pride in his efforts to rid the world of one race and is appalled when it is suggested he move to a new post.

Huller also chills as a wife who is amused when her husband calls her "the Queen of Auschwitz" and cannot comprehend ever leaving a home.

In a year when we have already been fortunate to have seen movies like 'All Of Us Strangers' and 'The Holdovers,' 'The Zone of Interest' sets a really high bar.

© A24 & Film 4

It's pure cinema - fully stretching the boundaries of sight and sound onscreen to create something truly original and remarkably inventive.

It may walk away with Oscars but that's by the by.

In a world where some people continue to deny the Holocaust and atrocities are carried out in war zones every day, it's an important reminder of the depths that men and women can still sink to.

It's an important film from a boundary pushing Englishman that will make you feel fortunate to have seen.

('The Zone of Interest' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on February 2, 2024)

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