Jonathan Glazer has many merits. The first is to have avoided falling into the trap of reducing “Shoah cinema” to an unambitious, commercial sub-genre. The second is to have revolutionised the equally lazy field of film adaptions: here, the novel of the same name by Martin Amis (an exceptional but misunderstood attempt to describe the grotesque inhumanity of the Nazi petit bourgeoisie from within) is reinvented from scratch and integrated with the (chilling) memories of Rudolf Höss. His third merit is to have chosen a “cinematic bias”: the family home of the perpetrators conceals dozens of cameras to capture the action, virtually a system of moral surveillance; its concept recalls TV’s Big Brother but here it is applied to an ethically disturbing situation (how can you sunbathe next to a swimming pool just a few metres from an extermination camp?). The style, then, is augmented with formal elements deriving from aesthetic choices that have been degraded by television and are now transformed into an operation resembling an art installation or a piece of video art. His fourth merit is to have made sound the key to The Zone of Interest’s artistic project (thus substituting the unrepresentable “stench of death” which bothered the novel’s characters). Through a formidable endeavour of collecting and synthesising screams, moans, noises, pistol shots, barks, bangs, industrial noises, and creaks, Glazer has created an excruciating off-screen space, a really vivid and sensorial testimony of what it means to perceive horror and allow it to continue. Aside from this, the narration is reduced to just a few elements, a few episodes, a monotony which contrasts markedly with the life and death situations faced by the prisoners and victims, whose personal effects (teeth, jewels, clothes, objects) occasionally reach the Höss family’s chalet. In addition to their bodies, everything is taken from the Jews: their testimony is suppressed, their legacy erased, their memories stolen. An instant classic.

Roy Menarini