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Movie of the Week #29 - The Zone of Interest
We continue with Cannes films with The Zone of Interest which premiered at Cannes in 2023 where it won the Grand Prix award. It also won two Oscars for Best International Film and Best Sound.
Besides any thoughts on this movie, do you think this adds anything new to the already long list of WW2/Holocaust movies?
The rest of the schedule for May is:
- 20th: Luxury Car
- 27th: The Tree of Life
For those who want to join in, it's available on Amazon Prime Video in most countries (AFAICT):
https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0ON5GYDWOV1S9N024BCUM1B97A/
Probably the only movie from this series that has been well documented by me on here.
Here are my thoughts on the film after I first watched it.
An online friend I have who I discuss awards stuff on predicted this film really early on for Oscar consideration (before it's Cannes premiere). And it got close to outright winning the Palme, if it wasn't for how crowd-pleasing Anatomy of a Fall is.
My initial reaction to this was that it felt very methodical, technical and cold. Shots are stationary and usually wide shots from a distance. We never get really close or personal with anyone. But it is not a character study. The Höss family is neither humanized or demonized. Instead we see how normalization works, where even the most horrible thing can be normalized into just another regular day. This was underlined with that small scene with the nazi officers and engineers discussion new approaches better efficiency in Auschwitz. Handled like any ordinary factory pipeline with input and output. Because that is exactly what mass murdering have been deconstructed to for them. I don't think I have thought about the holocaust process quite like that before. Even though this movie heavily relies on the viewer knowing what is going beyond the walls, I still think it adds a new unique reference point for that time in history.
The technical achievements in this is top tier filmmaking. They did their homework with the pre-production on that house, the sound design is immaculate and every piece of camerawork is exactly where it needs to be. Worthy winner for Best Sound with how the "background noise" is put at the same level of the sounds of what we see on screen. Maybe I didn't get the full experience at home, but still enough to get the intended impact from that sound design.