The Zone of Interest Featured, Reviews Film Threat

The Zone of Interest is a portrait of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name. Amis’s novel substituted the real Hoss and his family for the thinly fictionalized dolls. Still, Glazer has switched this back and jettisoned the fiction from the book, such as an affair between a philandering officer and the commandant’s wife, in favor of an exacting study of the historical figures. Albeit one suffixed with the cautious disclaimer that it remains a work of fiction, “not based on anyone living or dead.”
Hoss was a dedicated Nazi and a keen architect of Hitler’s Final Solution. The film mostly takes place between 1943 and 1944, when he was promoted to oversee a massive increase in prisoner transports from Hungary, amounting to a concerted and rapid liquidation of Nazism’s internal enemies. This is what we are witnessing in Glazer’s horror film, as spellbinding marginalia to the daily lives of an otherwise normal family.

“…architect for Hitler’s Final Solution…he was promoted to oversee a massive increase in prisoner transports from Hungary…”
The main dramatic strand centers on Hoss’s promotion and the unhappiness it causes his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who has grown attached to their comfortable life. In the opening scene, she tries on a fur coat, admiring it in a mirror and then feeling along the hem. We cut to a servant being ordered to fix the lining. We are left to guess what Hedwig tore out and the story of who hid it there in terror. 
Hedwig is devastated at the prospect of leaving their fine house and her well-developed garden in Auschwitz, a stunning and bleakly comic irony given the thousands of desperate prisoners adjoining it. 
Glazer’s film is marked by supremely judged restraint. The details of extermination are ever present but frequently rendered into the frame so subtly that it is almost essential to watch this film in a cinema, where these awful nuggets can be panned out of the stream of images more easily. The magisterial compositions of Glazer and his cinematographer Lukasz Zal were shot digitally, with natural lighting and no background music, so they and the cast have a lot of heavy lifting to do. A great deal of the photography borrows the Kubrickian trait of center framing, with the architecture dominating and isolating the actors, highlighting the tragic theme of subordination, whether to ideas or the zealots who deliver them.