Sandra Hüller

The Zone of Interest

28/01/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

The opening credits roll, the title appears onscreen… and then it slowly fades to black and the screen goes blank. For a very long time. I’m starting to think that something has gone wrong but then I become aware of dull sounds: a hubbub of voices, the occasional twittering of birdsong. And I think I know why director Jonathan Glazer has engineered this. 

He is giving the audience an opportunity to relax and take a few deep breaths, something we will doubtless be thankful for later.

The screen finally illuminates and we observe a family enjoying a tranquil summer picnic on the banks of a river: a father, a mother and their children of various ages. They laugh and splash in the water and chase each other through the trees. And a little while later, the family pack up their things and head back through the verdant countryside to their lovely home with its extensive garden. We can’t help noticing though, that a high wall borders that garden, a wall topped with barbed wire. And on the far side of it, we can just see a tall chimney spouting a thick column of smoke…

Welcome to the family home of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). He, of course, is the commandant of Auschwitz and spends much of his time on the other side of the wall, committing atrocities on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Hedwig runs the home, keeping a sharp eye on her many servants and even playing gracious host to her mother, who can’t believe how lucky her daughter is to have such a lovely home and garden to spend her time in. Mother even peers towards the wall and wonders if that woman is in there. You know, the one she used to clean for…

The Zone of Interest, adapted by Jonathan Glazer from the novel by Martin Amis is an extraordinary film – stark, chilling and impossible to dismiss. This is about the mundanity of evil, the bureaucracy of mass murder. It’s a film in which smiling men in business suits sit around a table with charts and statistics and work out the best way they can feed ever more people into the ovens – and how, if the ovens are recharged in rotation, they can, in effect, wipe an entire race of people off the face of the planet. 

Rudolph, we see, does not think of himself as a monster; he’s simply a man working to the orders of his Führer, doing his best to accomplish the difficult task he’s been set. He loves his wife, his children, even his horse. But of course, real monsters are just everyday people fuelled by hierarchy, encouraged by their superiors to wade ever deeper into the sewer of depravity. People who obey without question.

Like the best horror films, The Zone of Interest understands that what frightens an audience most is what it doesn’t see. There are no torture scenes here, no images of people burning, starving or fighting for their lives. But there are sounds in the background, a constant mingling of shouts, moans, screams and gunshots – a relentless cacophony that gradually grows in volume as the film progresses, sometimes accompanied by Mica Levi’s hellish soundtrack.

I cannot stop thinking about what’s happening on the other side of the wall, cannot feel anything but appalled that human beings can inflict such savagery on each other. And I’d be a lot happier if I believed that such things could never happen again. But sadly, I don’t.

The film has a coda which I won’t reveal, only to say that it depicts the aftermath of the Nazis’ attempted genocide, showing in a few broad strokes the enduring, poisoned legacy that they left in their wake. This may not be a film to ‘enjoy’ in the traditional sense, but it is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece, and one which I would urge every viewer to see.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Anatomy of a Fall

11/11/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is a sly and unconventional crime drama that steadfastly refuses to follow the familiar tropes of the whodunnit, preferring instead to explore the psychologies of its characters. It manages to sustain an air of mystery without ever offering viewers anything resembling a plausible solution – and yet, somehow, this only serves to make the story all the more intriguing.

In her remote chalet in the French Alps, novelist Sandra Voiter (Sandra Hüller) is attempting to conduct an interview with graduate student Zoé (Camille Rutherford). There’s an obvious attraction between the two – Sandra is openly bisexual – but up in the roof space, Sandra’s husband, Samuel (Alan Davies lookalike, Samuel Theis), is asserting his presence by doing some noisy manual work. He’s also playing music at an ear-shattering volume, which makes the planned interview impossible. It is soon abandoned and Zoé leaves. 

Shortly afterwards, Sandra and Samuel’s visually-impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), takes his dog for a walk in the snow and, on his return, he (quite literally) stumbles upon the bloody corpse of his father, lying a short distance from the house. Samuel has fallen from the attic space, striking a shed on the way down.

But did he jump – or was he pushed?

Soon, an investigation is under way and Sandra is the only suspect. Her past actions are making her look ever-more unreliable, so her attorney (Swann Arlaud) is struggling to construct a credible defence – and it probably doesn’t help that he is attracted to her. Meanwhile, the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) seems to have made it his personal mission to see her behind bars. 

The irony here is that the person with the clearest vision of what’s actually going on is a boy whose eyes don’t work…

Anatomy of a Fall is a strange beast indeed, a film that becomes increasingly compelling as it moves ever further away from anything approaching a straightforward resolution. The fact that the two main characters are writers of fiction – and the ways in which the narrative becomes increasingly more speculative as the case progresses – adds to the sense of intrigue. And then there’s a late-stage flashback, prompted by the discovery of an audiotape (recorded by Samuel), which sets everything spinning in an entirely different direction. Hüller offers a compelling performance in the lead role, but it’s young Machado Graner who makes the biggest impression, as the indefatigable Daniel, struggling to come to terms with the death of his father.

The nebulous nature of the plotting will doubtless have Agatha Christie spinning in her grave, but this feels like a fresh and unconventional approach to the crime genre and it’s easy to see why the film was chosen as the winner of one of cinema’s most coveted prizes. 

4.3 stars

Philip Caveney