Movie Reviews

Movie Review: In harrowing ‘Zone of Interest,’ the Holocaust's evils are cloaked in mundanities

Published

7 months ago

December 14, 2023

Movie Review: In harrowing ‘Zone of Interest,’ the Holocaust's evils are cloaked in mundanities

It’s just a woman trying on a fur coat alone in her room, and sampling a lipstick. It’s just a few friends discussing toothpaste orders over coffee in the kitchen. It’s just a housewife showing off her new garden and children’s pool, or a dad taking his kids fishing in a river.

The crucial context is that these scenes are occurring only a stone wall away from the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz. And it’s their very mundanity that makes them evil — the “banality of evil,” to use Hannah Arendt’s well-known phrase. In his meticulous and harrowing film “The Zone of Interest,” writer-director Jonathan Glazer has found a way to convey evil without ever depicting the horror itself. But though it escapes our eyes, the horror assaults our senses in other, deeper ways.

How does one even begin to depict the Holocaust? The question has challenged filmmakers for eight decades. Attempts to humanize the horror often lose sight of the scale of the genocide. And efforts to do justice to the unimaginable scale can lose sight of the human suffering.

Glazer has chosen a different route. Shooting, incredibly, on location, his entry point is an ordinary German couple trying to build a prosperous life for their family. It just happens to be at Auschwitz. And it just happens to be Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the notorious real-life former commandant of the camp, and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, brilliant in a terribly difficult role).

Höss spends his days overseeing the “processing” of trainloads of people, most sent directly to the gas chambers. Then he comes home, where he and Hedwig eat dinner, celebrate birthdays, read their kids bedtime stories, make plans for a spa holiday.

Or they go on picnics, which is where we begin, on an idyllic afternoon, the Höss family picking berries and sunning themselves. As darkness falls, they head back to their pristine two-story villa on the camp’s outskirts (in what the Nazis called the “zone of interest”).

It takes a while before we see the telltale signs: the camp watchtower, and later the flames blackening the sky. But we do hear sounds. Awful sounds. Dogs barking. Gunshots. Cries of fear, yelling. And the ugly roar — is it the belching chimney, or the arriving trains, or both? It all melds together, and you can’t get it out of your head. (Mica Levi wrote the chilling score.)

Hedwig surely hears all this. And so, we wonder what she’s thinking as she takes a nice fur coat into the bedroom and models it in the mirror, finding it to her liking, and ordering her maid to repair the lining.

The subtext, not spelled out: The coat, and lipstick in the pocket, is from a Jewish prisoner, no longer alive. Soon we hear chatter over coffee in the kitchen, about toothpaste. Hedwig has found a diamond hidden in a tube — those prisoners are crafty, she says — and so she is “ordering” more toothpaste, again turning the mundane into the truly hideous.

Nearby, between Rudolf and some visiting businessmen, the chatter is perhaps more consequential, yet just as incongruous. They are discussing a more efficient model of oven — the best mass cremation system money can buy, you might say. The words “burning,” “cooling” and “reloading” are heard; the word “murder” is not.

Life continues: An outing with the kids on a tranquil nearby river in a new kayak, Dad’s birthday gift, leads to an unexpected unpleasantness. Standing in the river fishing, Höss realizes that human remains are floating by.

Yet Hedwig Höss loves her home. She proudly shows off her growing garden, with its small swimming pool and wooden slide, to her visiting mother, who murmurs supportively: “You’ve really landed on your feet, my child.” Hedwig is proud. Her husband calls her “the Queen of Auschwitz,” she notes.

Adapting loosely from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, but choosing a real-life protagonist, Glazer spent years combing through records to piece together the Höss family history, and built his set for their home some 200 yards from where the real one stood.

The meticulousness with which Glazer and production designer Chris Oddy render this home — with its baby blue-colored beds in the kids’ room, only feet from putrid camp barracks — is an achievement. Glazer also has set up multiple surveillance-style cameras, tracking different pieces of action, and the effect is that of a documentary, with dialogue that often feels unscripted.

As for what happens over the wall, we see Höss there only once, in tight closeup. Hedwig certainly never crosses over. “They’ll have to drag me out of here,” she says, when her husband tells her they’re being transferred out. And she demands successfully to stay at Auschwitz, with the children. “We’re living how we dreamed we would,” she says. (Glazer found evidence from a former gardener that such a conversation happened.)

The film ends just as Höss learns — in what amounts to a promotion — that he’ll return to Auschwitz to step up the Final Solution with the annihilation of Hungary’s Jews, arriving at the rate of 12,000 a day.

And the real-life Höss did return, to implement more mass murder (he was later executed for war crimes), and to his wife, who’d found a way to grow beautiful flowers regardless of what was happening on the very same soil.

Surely few of us can imagine modeling a fur coat ripped from a doomed prisoner. But what Glazer is trying to tell us with such scenes — and also in his jolting final minutes — is that history is full of examples of ordinary, unremarkable people finding ways to block out the suffering of others. And that if we always assume we are so vastly different, we may be losing the chance to learn from the past.

“The Zone of Interest,” an A24 release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association “for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking.” Running time: 105 minutes. Four stars out of four.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'Despicable Me 4' fun for kids, nightmare for adults

Published

41 mins ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

Movie review: 'Despicable Me 4' fun for kids, nightmare for adults

The experience of watching “Despicable Me 4” is a Kafkaesque nightmare, and not only because one of the main characters turns himself into a roach. The film is an interminable 95 minutes of circular, intertwining, seemingly never-ending storylines rendered with such audio-visual cacophony that it dissolves into an indiscernible din. This fourth (or is it sixth?) installment of the inexplicably …

Movie Reviews

‘Kinds of Kindness’ review: Darkly comedic anthology explores humanity

Published

8 hours ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

‘Kinds of Kindness’ review: Darkly comedic anthology explores humanity

Throughout his filmography, Yorgos Lanthimos is interested in themes of love and obsession, often explored with characters, who seem to be living on the edge of normal society, as evident in 2009’s Dogtooth, which centered on a husband and wife who keep their children ignorant of the world outside their property well into adulthood. 2024 is already quite the year for the Greek director as his previous outing Poor Things has been a critical and commercial success that has won four awards at this year’s Oscars, and now his latest feature Kinds of Kindness is finally released.

Amidst the Frankenstein-like science and “furious jumping”, Poor Things is more of a crowd-pleaser through its story of self-discovery within the harsh reality of the otherwise outlandish world. Reunited with his long-time collaborator/co-writer Efthimis Filippou, Kinds of Kindness – set in modern-day New Orleans – is closer to Lanthimos’ earlier work like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, where people are plunged into situations that effectively shake up their lives and lose any touch of humanity in order to get out of it.

Since Lanthimos’ films often challenge you, though not without some dark humor creeping into the mix, Kinds of Kindness is essentially three films for the price of one, with the same seven actors – Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie – appearing in each one in a different role.

The first of which, titled “The Death of R.M.F”, is about Robert Fletcher (Plemons) who follows every order that is given to him by his controlling boss, Raymond (Dafoe), until he refuses to do an act which causes his life to fall apart. Similar to Lanthimos’ 2019 short film Nimic, it is a darkly funny study of a man who regrets this one decision and how it spirals out of control, with an extraordinary turn from Plemons, who tries to maintain his composure and yet it looks he’s about to break.

Considering the disturbing outcome of the first narrative, it feels tamed compared to the second story, “R.M.F. is Flying”. Left emotionally devastated after the disappearance of his wife Liz (Emma Stone), a marine biologist, police officer Daniel (Plemons) receives a call saying she has been rescued. As she returns home, her strange and seemingly reversed behavior leads to Daniel suspecting her of being an imposter. As well as being more disturbing and ambiguous than the other two narratives, “R.M.F. is Flying” cements a central theme which is somewhat meta to the film’s multiple casting of the same actors, playing characters who are wrestling with their own identity. Playing a married couple that is becoming more about obsessive delusions, leading to horrific abuse, Stone and Plemons are amazing in roles where you can’t tell whose side you should be on, if any.

As great as Emma Stone is in the first two narratives, it is in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” where she really gets to shine, and yes, this is where she performs her improvised dance that has been used in the film’s promotion. In this third and final instalment, Emily and Andrew (Stone and Plemons) are two cult members who are looking for a woman with the ability to bring back the dead. Considering this is the closest to a Coen Brothers film, where it almost feels like an enjoyable crime caper, what could easily be a cautionary tale about not joining a sex cult led by Dafoe’s Omi, the story makes a dark implication into why Emily would choose the life of a cultist, as seen in a scene where she revisits her old life as a mother and a wife.

Considering the hopeful nature and visual experimentation of Poor Things, whether consciously or not, it feels Lanthimos wants to return a world where there is no positive outcome of anybody, whilst cinematographer Robbie Ryan, shooting on 35mm Kodak film, presents a stunning, if mundane look of the many settings of New Orleans. Amongst the loose connective tissue between these three tales, including the brilliant cast and similar locations, the only sense of hope that Kinds of Kindness is the dreams that some of the characters have and no matter how nonsensical they are, it is better than the harshness that the real world can throw at them. One dream involving dogs delivers the biggest laugh-out-loud film of the entire film.

‘Kinds of Kindness’ review: Darkly comedic anthology explores humanity

Kinds of Kindness

Returning to the director’s roots, so to speak, Kinds of Kindness is strange, uncomfortable and challenging, if you can adjust to the tone of this near-three-hour anthology piece, you will enjoy this experience where you don’t know whether to laugh or pleasantly appalled at.

An incredible cast – with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons taking center stage – that go into strange places by playing three separate roles.

Three distinct storylines that are a darkly comedic exploration of love and obsession, a recurring theme in Lanthimos’ filmography.

Balancing moments of dark humor, with profound ideas about identity and purpose…

…even though the lack of easy answers and the lengthy running time will challenge a good section of the audience.

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Movie Reviews

“The Boy and The Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki, Movie Review – Signals AZ

Published

15 hours ago

June 30, 2024

Press Room

“The Boy and The Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki, Movie Review – Signals AZ

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When Hayao Miyazaki announced that 2013’s The Wind Rises would be his “final” film, many suspected that an artist of his caliber would eventually return to create again if given the chance.

Release Date: 07/14/2023

Runtime: 124 minutes

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Rotten Tomatoes: 97%

iMBD: 7.6/10

Where to Watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home, Google Play Movies, YouTube

The Boy and The Heron, Movie Review, film review, Hayao Miyazaki, movies to watch, Japanese films, Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli,

Ten years later, the legendary Japanese animator, known for classics like Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke presented us with perhaps his definitive work. This new magnum opus combines the finest elements of his previous films into something sure to be considered the greatest Hayao Miyazaki film of all time.

In the story, eleven-year-old Mahito loses his mother in a hospital fire during World War II

His father soon remarries—his late wife’s sister—moving them to the countryside where he can apply his manufacturing profession to the war effort and support his family as they welcome a second child. Behind their new rural home looms a strange, abandoned tower, and around the pond on the estate grounds flies a mysterious heron.

When his new mother enters the forest in the delirium of pregnancy, the entire estate goes searching for her. Only Mahito knows that the path to finding her leads into the tower.

The heron lures Mahito inside, and he soon finds himself in a dreamlike world that would make L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll proud

Unlike The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland, this narrative leads Mahito into a “world of the dead”—not in the morbid sense typical of Western mythology, but a beautiful realm where spirits migrate between planes of existence. From there he finds himself embarking on an adventure deeper into the world of dreams and death, where he ultimately learns to come to terms with the loss of his mother.

Like the greatest fairytales and childhood fantasies, The Boy and The Heron navigates its mythological story with a dream-logic familiar to anyone who’s plumbed the landscapes found in the deepest sleep.

What sets this film apart from similar narratives—in addition to its uniquely Shintoist approach to mythology—is the masterful cinematography and animation displayed across every frame

From beginning to end, this film showcases a master and his team working at the peak of their craft. It’s a childhood adventure on par with other classics in the genre, sure to take audiences of all ages on a journey they won’t soon forget, and one that begs for a second viewing by the time the credits roll.

About our Admit One Author

Isaac Albert Frankel

Isaac Frankel is a freelance writer and content creator specializing in reviews and analysis of cinema, interactive media, and mythological storytelling. He was raised in Prescott, AZ, wrote his first non-fiction book in 2013 after graduating from Tribeca Flashpoint College with a degree in Game & Interactive Media Design, and currently produces content for the YouTube channel: Off Screen.

More of his work and current projects can be found at www.isaacafrankel.com.