There are movies that confirm your place in the world, pictures that let you know you’re on the right track, capable of resolving any puzzle put before you. And then there are those that make you feel like the tiniest speck in the cosmos, a sentient but tentative being whose learning has just begun. Jonathan Glazer’s breath-stopping picture The Zone of Interest—playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival—is the latter kind. Glazer hasn’t made a feature in 10 years. His last was 2013’s Under the Skin, one of the most unnervingly poetic horror films of its decade, and perhaps any. The Zone of Interest is also a horror film, but a very different kind. It’s a movie about the most haunting atrocities of the Holocaust. It’s also a movie about marital companionship, about wanting the best for your children, about following the rules and working hard and feeling that you truly deserve the best in life. It’s about all the things that most people in the world want, entwined with the unspeakable.
At the movie’s center is a dream house built on nightmares. The house belongs to a family—the movie’s opening shows this little group and some family friends, in placid wide shot, lounging by a stream flanked by lush greenery, laughing, talking, drying their pale, damp skin after a swim. Though we can’t get a close look at them, we can see how utterly secure they are in their happiness, as if the sun above had been created just to shine down on them.
The head of this robust little family is Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) whose hard work and loyalty have earned him rich rewards: he’s the commandant of Auschwitz, and he and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) have been granted a fine parcel of land adjacent to the camp. They’ve got an austerely elegant house that meets all their needs, surrounded by a garden of bright flowers for their children to play in. Hedwig proudly…
