What's so interesting about The Zone of Interest?

In May of last year, Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim. It was released in theatres in December.

While The Zone of Interest is yet another retelling of World War II and the Holocaust, it takes an unconventional approach. The film centres around a well-off Nazi family that lives in a luxurious home right next to Auschwitz. It stars Christian Friedel as Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss and Sandra Hüller as his wife Hedwig.

Film critics Rad Simonpillai and Katarina Docalovich join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to give their thoughts on The Zone of Interest. Simonpillai explain what makes The Zone of Interest so compelling, while Docalovich elaborates on why she was put off by the film. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: I have a lot to talk about in terms of this movie. So Rad, maybe I'll start with you. I just set up the premise of The Zone of Interest off the top, but maybe you can give our listeners a sense of what it's like to actually experience this film. How does Jonathan Glazer draw you into the world of the Höss family? 

Rad: The movie is about how these people compartmentalise themselves and become kind of complicit and create a language around the task at hand to make them be able to perform it and suppress their own humanity.

Elamin: We're going to talk a little bit more about that mood in a moment. But Katarina, like Rad, you got to see this film when it premiered at Cannes last May. Tell me about the expectations you had going into the screening and then how you felt coming out of it. 

Katarina: I left with an empty feeling, and I wouldn't describe it as the same kind of empty feeling as if I had been hollowed out by the film's depiction of violence or the lack of the depiction of violence. It was more of the emptiness that comes with watching the kind of movie that favours style over its substance. 

Elamin: I'm really interested in this because you guys are reacting to the same element, but [Rad] sees it as a strength of the movie, and you see it as a devastating kind of weakness. But go ahead, Rad. 

Rad:  The way everyone seems to love this is a little suspicious. Like, how is everyone falling in love with this movie that's supposed to make us uncomfortable? And I feel like it should be more divisive if it's truly going to be making us feel uncomfortable. So I do hold room for the negative comments that Katarina makes. If it was truly making us feel complicit, there would have been more divisive reactions like Katrina's. 

Elamin: In a clip we just played, the director Jonathan Glazer says, "You can't get close to what that place was through reenactments." I'm interested in that idea, Katarina. In that clip, he's saying it's actually more effective to conjure the horrors through sound rather than images. Why did that approach ultimately not work for you? 

Katarina: I do think cinema is a medium of both images and sounds, and his images are always stuck in one place. They don't develop. I think they may as well have been stills while you have this score playing, I think you may as well have had this be an installation piece instead of a feature film.

I just don't think he had the stones to get close enough to the Nazi characters, let alone their victims. He always has an arm's length out from the Nazis. So I think it makes sense that he didn't want to wrestle too closely with the messy lives of Jewish victims. I mean, he's just so disinterested in the whole subject, besides making it as aesthetically pleasing as possible, he's just so indifferent to the whole thing. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman