Zone of Interest has some of the most sickeningly extraordinary diegetic sound design of the century. You are never about to tear the fabric off the armchair of the seat in the theater you're sitting in while watching, especially when characters talk idly about lilacs and flowers as wails of death and bullets are faintly yet very recognizable in the distance. There is also the cumulative effect of the multitude of horrors and horror ignored; the ashes wiped away; the jaw-bone found seemingly suddenly in the water; the teeth being played with (that was a hard one for me); the routines and cleaning and that one Jewish girl that we see, maybe the only one for any extended period of time, who does her cleaning and has to be unseen even though she's there (a Jeanne Dielman of this world).
The characters we are seeing throughout this are the Nazis, and in one of the most unflinching of the Banality of Evil depictions in a lifetime, we just see their every day routines, the connectivity of this morally rotten family, and the sadness the wife has when it looks like the husband/Commandant of the Auschwitz death camp may (gasp) have to be assigned to another post. We aren't supposed to connect to them, and that's the point; these are people in a precise environment of serenity and beauty when just over the side of that gray giant wall is.... death, abyss, killing, what this wife and kids dont have to face.
These are people, after all, who believe what they are doing is completely right and just, both the domestic and militaristic levels, ie when the Nazi officers discuss how the gas chambers and processes work they might as well be talking over widgets in a factory, and only a couple of them, like the older mother of "Queen of Auschwitz" Mrs Hoss (Huller) starting to cough from the, you know, smoke and ashes and all the things from the bodies coming over to her feel some physical inconvenience about it.
Huller by the way is very good once again in her other soul-scorching performance of the year (*very* different from that Fall character of course), and this time with a particular gait and walk I am as curious to know as with Giamatti's eye in the Holdovers (or, on the flipside, I don't need to know, it's a choice and that's it). It's not exactly a film for the performances as it is a directorial tour de force (excuse this kind of basic bitch level of description but I can't think of anything else), but everyone here is as believable as they should be. It's all very natural and the tone of their performances is stripped down but, importantly, they aren't dull on screen (a particularly ugly bit between the two boys where one locks the other in the little greenhouse comes to mind).
And among the many things I'm still mulling over (and I talked about with my mother and wife, the former knew nothing about this going in except "Nazis and Auschwitz" and that is always of unfortunate interest for her) is the ending; the editing of that moment with Hoss in the stairwell cutting to what we are seeing in present day, it has such a sharp and cutting insight into the nature of evil and how a person may have some idea, especially if they aren't aware of it, that this barbarism and genocide won't last, but we do and we shouldn't forget.... even if that remembrance is still being cleaned and scrubbed for us to see - and, crucially it cuts back to him in the hallway as he stares into the darkness, it stares back at him, and he goes on his way. Ill bee mulling over that for a long time.
One thing I'm not sure on: the b&w infrared moments when Hoss reads the bedtime stories. Didn't work for me, but maybe it will after I watch some interviews.
