Zone of Interest

Zone of Interest. Jonathan Glazer.

I’ve not read the Martin Amis novel; I only realised it exists in the end credits. I’m not Jewish. What I am, though, is a man raised and schooled in England in the 80s; I’m 48 in May. I was taken on a school trip to see Schindler’s List; I had the benefit of a particular History Teacher, Nicholas Westfold, who, despite the base curriculum of how Winston Churchill came in and saved everyone from the Germans and Europe should love us, went to great pains to teach us a human dimension of the Holocaust. I grew up with Mum, having friends who were from Germany and kids at school whose parents had experience as Germans to filter and inform my view. In later years, I took the Holocaust as a subject in my final year in literature, specifically If This is a Man by Primo Levi, Schindler Arc by Thomas Keneally and Fatherland by Richard Harris.  I would love to dismiss this film on one level, but there is another where I fear the bar has sunk in the last 25 years, and even this level of scrutiny may be necessary for the later generation, and that only fills me with fear.

It follows an almost idyllic family, one out of the sound of music, with chubby babies and scrappy kids taunting and laughing at every opportunity. At the same time, the mother lays the table, and the dad looks resplendent both in his work clothes and radiant in his white. The bubble-like dynamics soon prove this is grotesque as the witness of their lives is tarred with the ashes of the dead, and the riches they enjoy are a dead man’s boots. However, there is a heavy-handedness to this allegory that browbeats its impact. It soon becomes numbing.

A Rudolf Hoss ascends the ladder within the Reich; there is a specific allegory of their lives and contemporary life. He increases authority while lacking accountability in a way that could mirror remote management as the invisible of society are left in the residue of their luxury. The worries of long-distance relationships in a pre-zoom world seem mirrored, and the decay of how children should be taught to behave is hinted at by natural erosion. Even the intergenerational with the mother-in-law coming to give support only to flee at the industrial age behind her could be seen as of the time.

But the film techniques are both ham-fisted and oblique when showing us the events within that domestic world. The night vision camera lends nothing to the events, and I had to read what was happening in one scene just now on Wikipedia when the lighting gave nothing. The fades to white and black and industrial grind. It does evoke the recurring truth that one of the worst things about evil is the banality in its disregard for human life. But it lumbers this throughout the film with a numbing lack of pace that is not so much shocking as endurance testing. It invites an almost fugue state from the viewer that devalues the message through the medium.

It’s a bold choice to put the holocaust in the background and create an almost Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of the family Hoff. Still, the reality undermines that their wealth does not correlate with the economic time, function, money, and staff, all thrown at genocide If anything was detrimental to Germany’s war plans. It’s an empty upheaval, much like Hoffs at the outcome. I feel mirroring elevates it from more than a novelty. But it’s far too humourous to hold attention for long.

For an event so traumatic, this film is entirely forgettable. And that scares me.