Filmgoers wandering into the Bairnsdale Sun Cinema during its Riviera Film Festival (7-20 March) without a background in history will wonder what they’ve stumbled upon.
In 1943, Nazi Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedl), commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller, also in Anatomy of a Fall) and their five children in an idyllic home next to the camp. The manse is beside the camp, yet the family goes about its life as if nothing’s going on.
The children swim in a backyard pool, Höss takes them fishing in a nearby river, and Hedwig tends the flower and vegetable garden taking pride in showing it to her mother (Imogen Kogge).
Beyond the garden wall, gunshots, dogs barking, screaming, shouting, and the sounds of trains and furnaces are audible.
Smoke rises into blue sky.
We do not see. We hear.
We know the horrors on the other side of the garden wall.
The soundtrack will startle and upset your equilibrium.
Höss goes to work (camp inspection) in his pristine white uniform mounted on a white horse.
Wife Hedwig asks if he can pick up some chocolate for the children.
She tries on a fur coat. A bundle of new underwear is dumped on a kitchen table, the Polish servants told to help themselves.
“Where does it come from?” The calm reply is, “Canada,” the cover-up code used by Auschwitz inmates for confiscated goods.
A United Kingdom-Poland co-production loosely based on Martin Amis’ novel, dialogue is in German with English subtitles.
The film has multi-nominations and award wins.
No one was behind a camera. No one called for “action” or “cut”, rather a multi-camera system, where cameras were hidden.
Actors went about the scripted business of ordinary life never knowing when being photographed. The key to this ordinariness allowing audiences to live with these monsters, even identifying with them, dismisses the thought we are ever above their abominable existence and can look down upon them.
That is an upsetting horror.
Movie: The Zone of Interest
Duration: 105 mins
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Starring: Sandra Huller, Christian Friedl, Imogen Kogge
Reviewed by Lawrenty
