The Zone of Interest - Crippling, Discomforting
Thoughts On: The Zone of Interest (2023)
A gaze upon a Nazi commandant's familial life on the edge of a concentration camp.
The Zone of Interest is intentionally awful; a horrible mire for the sensations. It has at in its foreground a subtle melodrama of a family struggling to establish a home after relocation due to war; this is an pseudo-isolated strain of the narrative separated from its proceeding layers moving into the background. Like Son of Saul, this engages the holocaust and its horror, incapable of utilising standard mise en scene, separating a foreground of forced perspective from unspeakable inhumanity. But where Son of Saul relies on a literal forced perspective, almost the entirety of the film shot in close-ups, The Zone of Interest expands this into a narrative device, simultaneously framing the fabula and syuzhet from a forced perspective and therefore holding the audience on the edge of hell visually and structurally. This is then not an easy film to engage at all; the sound track and abstract psycho-cinematic signalling (reminiscent of Gaspar Noé) ensures this. Effectively unsettling, while we are not permitted to see beyond the other side of the walls of concentration camps in The Zone of Interest, we are suffocated by the shadow's presence. We are made to see a prosperous family with good stead in Nazi war politics struggle and adapt on the frontier of the Nazi's hellish tyranny. They encounter existential dread in their disavowal of their evil and lose spirit in the destruction of their familial and literal nature. We then see them confront the trials of polluted air and water, soiled clothes and the cold of the winter while concealing their reality with greenery, trees, flowers and vines in the hopes of masking their inhumane lives with remnants of an uncorrupted human nature. This masking constructs a mirror in the narrative, directing us toward the absence: the other side of the wall. We then watch the queen of Auschwitz and her husband preside over a counterfeit paradise, sick to feel in proximity to the true loss of humanity experienced on the other side of the concentration camp walls; the true destruction of family and the human spirit; the real grounds of genocidal pollution and enforced destitution and slavery. Again, it is a meaningless melodrama in the foreground of The Zone of Interest, and a much more obscene reality lurking in the background, obscured and shrouded yet merely muffled; its poison unconcealable before the soul. More could be said of this detailed technical engagement of narrative and cinematics, but what should be emphasised above all else that The Zone of Interest is a thoroughly awful experience - and in all intention.
