The Zone of Interest (2023)

The Zone of Interest (2023) is a British-Polish-American war drama written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, who also made the ultra-bad Under The Skin ten years earlier, in 2013. Its title comes from the area of interest in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which also inspired Martin Amis’ novel The Area of Interest, from which the film is adapted.

Presented in competition at the Cannes 2023 Film Festival, the film won the Grand Prix, as well as the FIPRESCI prize, the CST Technical Artist prize for Johnnie Burn, the film’s sound designer and chief sound editor, and the Cannes Soundtrack Award for Micachu’s original score. The film was also nominated for three Golden Globes and five Oscars in 2024. It won the Oscar for Best International Film and the Oscar for Best Sound.

Of course it did! It’s only to be expected… Yes, because, once again, I quickly realised that the director would revel in playing with the same codes throughout his film. This director has hypnotised millions of people because this film was bound to be a huge success.

Someone wrote: ‘For the first time in my life in 40 years, I got out after 10 minutes. Every frame was an ordeal. As I left the cinema, in an act of resistance, I said to the director: ‘You may be clever, but I’m stronger than you and you can’t fool me’.

So here goes my review:

The film is introduced with four minutes of black screen with music that is already disturbing and oppressive. It will remain deliberately stressful, heavy, and even horrific throughout the film. So be it! So you can arrive at the cinema late, and you won’t miss the start of the film. If ever, at the end of forty-five minutes, we also get a few seconds of a red screen, this time.

Interesting subject, but boring film. The image is beautiful, but the direction is poor. It was very painful and difficult for me to watch this film, but for the wrong reasons. I know I’m going to be criticised straight away by people who don’t think, when they think it’s me who’s not using my brain. But just because I don’t like a non-American independent film, considered by some to be a masterpiece, doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to say what I think. And that doesn’t give anyone the right to talk down to me.

With that out of the way, I’m sticking to my guns and… No, I didn’t like this film, which I really wanted to see as soon as possible. It’s not because it’s not an action film. It’s simply because it’s badly made, badly filmed, badly brought to life, and badly directed. Nothing is done to capture the attention of someone with an attention deficit.

Long, slow, static shots. We often see the characters in their entirety, not zooming in on their faces while they’re having a conversation.

No interest in the Zone of Interest! Nothing happens and we’re bored stiff. Shots of a man turning off the lights in the flat one by one, shots of the stairs being lowered one by one… It’s abysmally empty! It’s one thing not to show what’s happening on the other side of the wall, but to show nothing of what’s happening in front of it is appalling.

After 15 minutes, you grasp the message, the discrepancy, and the inhumanity. The subject of the film is: ‘The architects of the Final Solution were able to live a normal life while denying the suffering and horrors of the Holocaust’. OK, we understood that! I doubt that so much film time was needed to make us understand the discrepancy between the horror of the camps and the surreal life of those who ran them. The director uses Nazi uniforms and their impeccable, chilling organisation to aesthetise what he is denouncing. Paradoxical and unsuccessful. You could also add pretentious, slick, and emotionless, with a lot of incomprehensible things. Too many films are like this one: superficial, without depth…

I found this review that made me smile: ‘Tired friends. If you need a moment’s rest, this is the film for you. It’s soporific, uninteresting even though the idea is very interesting. Good night… and I’m writing anything to get the obligatory 100 characters for a review acceptable to the site because I think I’ve told you everything about the film.’

How do you get the horror of the camps across to the younger generation with such a flat production style, in search of new cinematographic effects? The director has indulged himself by completely forgetting the message that this kind of film should convey. As far as possible, don’t go and see this film on the big screen: you’ll be doing cinema a favour and honouring all those who perished during this black page in our history.

You can’t, on the pretext of dealing with such a serious subject, be so boring and arouse NO feelings! Or rather, I should say: under no circumstances should you make such a boring film about such a serious subject.

Here’s another review to add to mine:

‘The Shoah from a side that has never been seen,’ and for good reason: that side doesn’t need to be seen. So yes, artistically ‘The Zone Of Interest’ is interesting: tracking shots, still shots, sounds, music, everything is beautiful. It’s clear that the experience is one of sensory experience. You feel the chill of the situation, the ease with which this family lives on the brink of hell. The choices they have to make, which are only a few metres away. Loving the snow, not wanting to leave, enjoying it: these are pleasures not available to everyone they meet. Peace on one side, anarchy on the other. But this calm is unbearable because it’s 1 hour and 45 minutes of calm. Nothing happens, there’s no dialogue, no script, no story. So yes, that’s the film’s message: the peaceful life of a family that creates hell just a few steps from home. But it’s a bore. The long black shots, to the displeasure of incorruptible cinephiles, reinforce this interminable aspect.

It is not humanly acceptable to make a film that focuses entirely on the point of view of the executioners. The director said he wanted to denounce Nazi barbarism. I object to this idea. If you want to show the full horror of the Shoah, you have to show the full horror of the Shoah! Full stop. You don’t necessarily have to show endless close-ups of explicit physical violence because that’s not what I’m saying. On the contrary, we don’t need to see the horror in gore either.

I’ll just finish by saying: Art is demanding in order to be appreciated and admired.