DISCOMFORT ZONE

Opening in the Valley today:

The Zone of Interest--A happy young German family swims in a lake. The kids play in the yard of their sunlit house; the mom gossips with girlfriends, or tries on a fur coat in the mirror. The kids surprise the dad with a beautiful birthday gift. The dad's colleagues show up at the house for work meetings.

Only gradually do we see that these people are living literally next door to a massive factory-like complex with spewing smokestacks. Just over the wall from the cheerfully flowered yard, faintly but constantly, we hear trains arriving, gunshots, people screaming. And dear old dad leaves for work in the unform of an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer. It's 1943, and he's Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz and chief designer of the camp's systems of mass murder. The fur coat, and plenty of other loot, had previous owners.

Shot in Poland at Auschwitz, this quiet, reticent film shows us no atrocities; we only overhear them. It's Hannah Arendt's famous banality of evil dramatized, but with the banality front and center and the overt evil kept in the wings.

The English writer-director Jonathan Glazer (of Sexy Beast), very loosely adapting the like-titled novel by Martin Amis, keeps the family's pleasures and squabbles and mild career crises in the foreground, though even these are treated in a humdrum, naturalistic style. When the Commandant (Christian Friedel) learns that a major effort to exterminate Hungarian Jews is going to be named "Operation Höss" after him, he giddily phones his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) in the middle of the night to tell her, as if he'd been named Employee of the Month.

This movie makes its point, powerfully and fully, within the first ten minutes or so. Yet Glazer keeps it from becoming repetitive. He also offsets the main story with scenes, shot in a weird thermagraphic effect, of a young girl in the Polish Resistance furtively stashing apples, presumably for the prisoners to find, and the artifacts she finds left by them. Though based on testimony, these moments of courage and humanity have, in the context of the film, an almost fairy tale beauty; Glazer links them to scenes of Höss reading bedtime stories to his kids.

It's possible--not certain, but possible--that Glazer's elliptical approach here is more likely to have a meaningful impact on audiences than the piling on of graphic horrors and outrages that other Holocaust movies offer. Last year my kid and I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It struck me at the time that, as essential as the forensic explanations of the mass murder were (seemingly mindful of this, Glazer includes contemporary footage of the displays at Auschwitz being maintained), it was the exhibits describing the willfully oblivious or even approving society at large, leading up to and during the genocide, that felt most horrific and recognizable.

In the same way, The Zone of Interest can make us reflect on what we're tolerating, comfortably out of sight just over our own garden walls.