I’ve soured on Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. While I was disturbed by the film’s unique format and gut wrenching sound design, something about it started to bother me in the weeks after I first saw it. First, Jack Mason pointed out to me that the end of The Zone of Interest — a corny flash forward to the Holocaust Museum at Aushwitcz today that I already pinpointed as the film’s worst and most tonally off idea — is more or less a stylized, atmospheric rip-off of the end of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, where Spielberg flashes forward to the survivors saved by Oscar Schindler mourning at the graves of the Jews murdered by the Nazis. Not only did Glazer blow his own ending — as I pointed out previously, he already had a solid one if he cut to black on the sequence of Rudolf Hoss retching on the top of the stairs — he ended up nodding to the actually interesting, if more commercial, Holocaust film.
What really started me second guessing this film, however, was the near unanimous praise that it received. Given how alienating and formally weird the movie is — essentially a boring as fuck domestic drama with a horrific noise music soundtrack played at the same time — it’s been lavished with praise by Hollyweird. While there were some whispers about Glazer reducing Jewish trauma to stylization, it’s been hard to find negative reviews about the film elsewhere. All this makes me suspicious – perhaps the reason a supremely unsettling but utterly boring Holocaust movie is due to its timing, when Israel finds itself floundering to propagandize support for its bombing campaign in Gaza. This is now ironic, given that Glazer used his acceptance speech at the Oscars for Best Director to agitate on behalf of the Palestinian cause, condemning the Israeli war machine. While this could have been annoying, it does demonstrate that Glazer is perhaps unchained to the IDF and has his own perspective, which is laudable.
Ultimately, what’s really wrong with The Zone of Interest is that it’s not really cinema. This is not a narrative film. After the shock of it wore off, I realized that I had absolutely no interest in seeing the movie ever again. Due to its form, it will have no lifespan beyond its theatrical run. The sound design of the film, of course, was impressive as an experiment. But did this need to be an hour and forty five minutes long? Did this need to be a “film”? No. It could have had the exact same impact and made its point as a 25-minute experimental short screening in an art gallery. If you had made this film with any other narrative grounding than the Holocaust, then the interest it would have generated would have been fractional of what it turned into. I love plenty of experimental films, believe me, but the way that Glazer manipulates the audience using this loaded historical content is grating.
Glazer worked on this film for 10 years. TEN FUCKING YEARS! One can’t help but imagine what the artist could do if he started being more productive, and perfecting his craft. Over his very long career, he’s only made four films and only one of them, Under the Skin, qualifies as a great work of cinematic art. This movie’s prolonged production feels like hollow marketing – no different than stories of method actors eating glass or self-harming to “stay in character.” Ultimately, the conceit of The Zone of Interest is ham-fisted. Its reliance on sound design to create its atmosphere is a bit like watching The Wizard of Oz on acid while playing Dark Side Of the Moon over it, except the latter is fun. The Zone of Interest is obviously a meditation on cognitive dissonance. But it made its point in the first 30 minutes. Glazer’s pretentiousness, however, is boundless, and it suffocates what are otherwise interesting conceptual techniques.
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