Jonathan Glazer returns for the first time in a decade with a very precise and unsettling feature about the family life of Rudolf Höss, the commander of the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

“Ich bin die Königin von Auschwitz”, (“I am the Queen of Auschwitz”), Hedwig Höss says at one point – with a wry, nonchalant, and complacent film on her face –, in what is Sandra Hüller’s strongest performance since Toni Erdmann (r. Maren Ade, 2016). What renders this line petrifying is not just its absolute inadequacy or its immediate association with history’s darkest abysses, but rather, it’s the tone – both jovial and arrogant, spoiled and yet somewhat serious. In another scene, when she tells her husband Rudolf, the architect of the most horrific crime in modern history, that their actions are in line with what the Führer meant by Lebensraum, her eyes are imploring, shining beneath her pursed eyebrows, and the horrific part about is her sincerity.

Over the two hour-span of The Zone of Interest, British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s first fiction feature since Under the Skin (2013), we take a close look at the family life of one of the most monstrous men in history: Rudolf Höss, the commander of the extermination camp in Auschwitz, the same man who, confronted with the accusation of being responsible for the murders of three and a half million people at the Nüremberg Trials, flatly replied that “It was just two and a half million – the others died of disease and starvation”. Shortly before his execution, Höss penned several confessional letters admitting to his crimes, and expressing remorse.

But Glazer refuses to go all up to this final chapter in his life, to offer him the grace of afterthought, choosing to end the plot of his film in 1944, when Höss was organizing one of his greatest crimes: the deportation of the Hungarian Jews (400,000 people, which included the Jewish population of occupied Transylvania.) And rightly so – the very end of the film consists of a suite of shots from inside the contemporary Auschwitz museum at night, while the institution’s cleaning personnel is wiping down the windows of rooms containing mountains of shoes and other artifacts stolen from the Jewish people that were deported from all across Europe. The Höss family also takes part in this theft: at the very onset of the film, we see Hedwig (whose real-life counterpart, like so many others, claimed that she had “not known” was happening in the camps) as she’s trying on a sumptuous nutria fur coat, discovering a used Helena Rubinstein lipstick in one of its pockets – a hint that is as subtle as it is harrowing, indicating the pure abomination, infamy and obscenity of their lives, right across the fence from the site of the most horrible crime in history.

Loosely based on Martin Amis’ – who passed away just a day after the film’s world premiere in Cannes eponymous novel, The Zone of Interest is set in this sumptuous family home and its surroundings (notably, Glazer used the real-life location as a set, placing a dozen cameral all around the home to catch the movement of the actors from one room to the other). We witness the home in all of its bucolic routine – the visits received by Hedwig from other Nazi wives or from her relatives, the children’s birthdays and moments of playtime, Rudolf’s work meetings in his salon office, where scientists present him models of more “efficient” incinerators; all of this takes place between people who are not only capable of ignoring the neighboring atrocity but that are also strikingly emotionally detached and mechanical.

Just listen to the constant rumble of screams (belonging to both victims and torturers) that permeates all these monstrously idyllic scenes in the Höss villa, where just goes on by. Their garden is large and sumptuous, and the smoke from the steam engines of the death trains raises, at times, above the greenhouse replete with exotic plants – while, at night, a deathly silence sets in, illuminated by the infernal flames of the incinerator’s furnace. The only hint of this infamy – beyond the rare and brief discussions about Jewish people – resides in their attitude towards the family’s Polish maids: for example, when Hedwig, this Jeanne Dielman from hell, threatens the youngest one that she will get her husband to burn her and spread her ashes all over the fields of Silesia. The banality of evil, Hannah Arendt?, we might be tempted to ask ourselves. No: this is the obscenity of evil, the result of this violent spatial juxtaposition, which births an answerless question – how can one be able to live such a life?

Any film about the Holocaust enters – willingly or not – into a dialectic relationship with the history of its representation, a history of “representing the irrepresentable”, as the saying goes, starting from pioneers like Resnais and Farocki onwards – and this is a wager that Glazer consciously takes on, from both a narrative and aesthetic perspective. First of all, by depicting unspectacular, quotidian moments (similarity: Mephisto, 1981, especially the ball scene; contrast: The Downfall, 2004) from the lives of individuals often profiled as monsters, and that is precisely to prove that turning them into Others, into Myths via the imaginary of the monster, one loses sight of the fact that, at the end of the day, these individuals were people (or, in the director’s own words, “human beings did this to other human beings”.) The mere act of representing the perpetrators carries an anathema – most often, we see representations of the victims, but here, beyond the foley, we cannot see them: see the low-angle shot of Rudolf in the camp, enveloped in smoke, while a torrent of howls worthy of the River Styx is engulfing him; perhaps, the act of refusing to explicitly represent (and thus to indulge in voyeurism) suffering is a way to offer the dignity of the victims.

It might just be that the complete opposite (or extreme counterpoint) to a film like The Zone of Interest is Son of Saul (2016, r. Lazlo Nemes, Palme d’Or) – and it will indeed be quite interesting if Glazer will return home with the same trophy, at the end of this week. The long, hand-held tracking shots in Nemes’ film, shot on a low focal length, which mean to say that you are a direct, involved witness are replaced by static ones, often alternating in rapidly-edited sequences, very precise in their chromatic and geometrical composition, which mean to say that you are an accomplice.

Many critics expressed reserves towards the film’s predominant aesthetics (which also features several signature shots, captured on thermal cameras, featuring small moments of resistance on the part of the maids), accusing it of glamorizing the moral atrocity that is displayed on the screen. However, I find that it’s quite the opposite – precisely by using a very rigorous aesthetic formula that, in extremis, may be compared to the art and architecture of the Third Reich, the film is not just creating a congruency between its formal and narrative plants, but it’s actually deepening the spectators’ critical position, by including cinema itself to the field of critique, in a gesture of self-reflexiveness.

Of the films shown so far at this edition of the Cannes Film Festival, The Zone of Interest is certainly amongst its strongest, maybe even the strongest of them all – thus reconfirming Glazer as one of the best British filmmakers of the moment. Wielding all the necessary force to deeply unsettle its spectators, to provoke a sensation of deep terror without going for any cheap tricks or shortcuts, but exactly through recalling their deepest inner fears (irrationality, sociopathy, cognitive bias, dissociation) by eliciting an analytical position, the film will certainly be a mainstay of this year’s critical and academic discourses.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.