The Zone of Interest

Directed by Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest follows Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) as he and his wife (Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig) attempt to make a life for their children next to a concentration camp. It’s an intriguing premise that’s employed to sporadically compelling yet mostly uninvolving effect by Glazer, as the filmmaker, armed with his own screenplay, offers up a deliberately-paced drama that contains exceedingly few conventional elements and attributes – including character development and a propulsive narrative. (The latter is especially problematic given that the picture contains little in the way of forward momentum, which ensures that one’s patience does begin to grow increasingly thin as time slowly progresses.) And although it boasts stirring performances, eye-catching cinematography, and impressively foreboding sound design, The Zone of Interest builds towards a fairly anticlimactic third act that hardly packs the stirring, emotionally-devastating punch Glazer has surely intended – with the end result an ambitious failure that never quite adds up to more than the sum of its parts (ie there are admittedly a handful of spellbinding sequences here, to be sure).

** out of ****