Jonathan Glazers The Zone of Interest dares the viewer to see themselves in the devil.
When we meet them, Rudolf and Hedwig are an ordinary couple with ordinary concerns.
Both are fixated on making sure their children are happy.
Jonathan Glazer depicts their lives as the most mundane of domestic concerns.
He raised his children at the mouth of hellheck, he even designed the gate.
It was such a successful innovation, Hitler promoted him in gratitude for his resourcefulness.
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Those are the bleak, almost incomprehensible facts of history and the man.
Instead this movie is something slightly more obtuse and therefore infinitely more insidious.
In another scene, she shows her mother around her garden that is punctuated by splashes of red roses.
Glazer essays the blatant banality of evil with a deceptively disinterested gaze.
They too just looked the other way when the trains rolled by.
This peculiar approach to the material is as uncomfortably vital to our moment as it is chilling.
So often in movies, Nazis are depicted as incomprehensibly evil or cartoonishly vile.
The Zone of Interestopens in the U.S. on Dec. 15 and in the UK on Feb. 2, 2024.
