The photography inside the house rarely creeps closer to the actors than extreme wide shots. Hence, the costumes and makeup by Malgorzata Karpiuk and Waldemar Pokromski are essential touchstones for pinpointing character states. Whether when a yard full of uniformed officers, boots gleaming in the sunlight, cheerily toast Höss on his birthday or when Höss himself is half naked in shirt tails, scrubbing his genitals in a dingy camp cellar after availing himself of an inmate. The costumes form into vital portraiture. One dress, worn by a local girl working for the Polish resistance, is the same one worn by the real resistance member. Glazer has miraculously given the utmost priority to authenticity without taking any dramatic wind from the film’s sails.
Friedel and Hüller excel in their depictions. Their work is understated and straightforward. Fixed cameras were hidden to render the Höss’s house as faithfully as possible, based upon actual family photographs, and this gave the actors freedom to immerse themselves, which they do with unnervingly sober and unshowy performances.
“…hidden cameras, lack of lights and the exacting sets demand a real thoughtfulness in the staging, and Glazer is inventively subtle in doing so…”
The exacting sets and natural lighting demand a real thoughtfulness in the staging, and Glazer is inventively subtle in doing so. For example, when two of Höss’s young daughters (Nele Ahrensmeier and Lilli Falk) are still wet from a dip in their pool, they read the guest book in the hall. It’s a sweet scene. But the puddle they leave, conspicuous in the natural daylight, prompts an ominous scolding for a servant whom Hedwig would happily “spread as ashes” on the surrounding fields.
Barring the dreadful north star of a distant chimney, glowing in the night sky and befouling it in the daytime, the most consistent orientation to what is happening is aural. The sound stage by Maximilian Behrens and Johnnie Burn is terrifying. The clank and grind of industry never seems to end, and it is regularly accompanied by a distant chorus of pistol fire, rifle fire, and screams, all measured out with a mean and suspenseful economy. Music has been eschewed, barring two powerful, dismal compositions by Mica Levi used as overture and finale.
The Zone of Interest easily joins the canon of sublime war films alongside Platoon, Come and See, and Paths of Glory. It places substantial and sincere inquiries about humanity’s shadow within a mass market medium with instructive power, and it does so with peerless levels of craft. It’s a masterpiece of cinema.
"…easily joins the canon of sublime war movies..."
