Movie Review The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest (2023) 

Directed by Jonathan Glazer 

Written by Jonathan Glazer 

Starring Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel 

Release Date December 15th, 2023 

Published 

The Zone of Interest is a devastating work of art. It's an unflinching and horrific movie but not because it depicts the holocaust in any direct fashion. Rather, The Zone of Interest places the horrors in your mind all while an affluent family headed up by the Nazi Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp goes through the daily routines of your average suburban family. It's the casualness of it all that drills the horror of the holocaust into your subconscious. I should not have been so gobsmacked by seeing the family of a Nazi casually carrying on as if what their father does is just like any other job but it just kept hitting me again and again how horrific this all is. The normalization of the systematic murder of six million people leads you the revelation of how we normalize the horrors of the world every time we turn a blind eye to suffering and death. 

The Zone of Interest centers its story on Commandant Rudolph Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller). As he goes off to work, she attends to the house staff and gets the kids off to school. It's all so familiar and normal. You see this tableau unfold in every suburb. Except for the part where Rudolph is wearing a crisply detailed Nazi uniform and is walking next door to his job as the commandant at Auschwitz where he's charged with finding the most efficient way to murder Jewish people while keeping just enough of them alive for slave labor for the camp or industry. His approach to his job is no different from your average middle manager holding meetings with higher ups while filing efficiency reports on the number of people he's able to brutally murder. 

Meanwhile, his wife is entertaining friends and family in their well appointed home. The film unfolds a number of callous and cruel scenes as packages are delivered to the home and it slowly dawns on us that the various pieces of clothing and personal items are those of Jewish people being murdered next door. For example, Hedwig receives a package containing a mink coat. She tries it on and poses in front of a mirror. She finds a lipstick in the pocket and starts applying it. She's as carefree as if she'd just purchased these items and they belong to her. If she cares at all where these items came from or how she's taking things that belonged to people her husband is murdering, you can't see it on her face or in her eyes. There is a sociopathic level of not caring in Hedwig. Her sense of cruel entitlement is soul shaking for anyone with a conscience. 

In a later scene, Hedwig's mother comes to visit and they have a conversation about a former neighbor, an elderly Jewish woman. The conversation casually discussed the woman's curtains and how the mother envied those curtains before wondering if the woman had been murdered next door. The mother indicates that she's far more upset that she wasn't the one to end up with those curtains than she's bothered by the fate of her former neighbor. Director Jonathan Glazer does not flinch in his presentation of these scenes. The mundanity of this conversation, the casual disregard for the lives of Jewish people is chilled my spine and that's the point. If you don't find this monstrous, there is something horrifically wrong with you, just as there is something absolutely wrong with these characters. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Anatomy of a Fall

Anatomy of a Fall (2023) 

Directed by Justine Triet 

Written by Justine Triet, Arthur Harari 

Starring Sandra Huller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner 

Release Date August 23rd, 2023 

Published December 11th, 2023 

A man is found dead in a pool of his own blood lying outside of his home. Tragically, the first person to find his body is his young son, a boy who was partially blinded in an accident several years earlier. He can see up close and it's not until he's up close to the body of his late father that the gravity of what he can see really hits him. Boy screams for his mother who comes running. The police are called and a grueling investigation is set to occur to determine how the man got from the attic of the home where he was installing insulation to being dead on the ground outside of his home. 

Suicide is the story that Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) is going with but there are questions about her account of what occurred. Sandra has lied about key details of what led to her husband's death. She lies about how close they were, she lies about having had a screaming argument with him. Caught in the midst of all of this is the boy, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) whose memory of that day will be the key to unlocking what happened that day. Did Sandra murder her husband after a particularly nasty argument? Did dad take his own life by throwing himself out of a third story window? That's the mystery that drives Anatomy of a Fall. 

Directed by Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall is a gripping courtroom thriller. Featuring an icy and fierce leading performance by Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall separates itself from the legal drama genre by taking what is familiar and doing it better. It helps a great deal that we are in a French courtroom and not an American one. The French, according to this movie, my only reference point, follow a much more loose structure. Lawyers for the prosecution and defense are allowed to linger over theories and converse with people who are not currently on the witness stand. It's strange to watch if you've never seen a court room thriller in France and that raises the bar for this relatively creaky genre. 

I was captivated when the prosecuting attorney turned from the person who was testifying and began addressing Huller's Sandra directly to get her reaction in real time to what the witness had alleged. In an American courtroom this would be out of line and would like get a contempt citation. In France, this is normalized behavior and Sandra is forced to address the evidence presented as it is presented. The prosecutor can turn heel and speak to Sandra as if she were on the witness stand at all times. This does give Sandra a chance to respond to all of the evidence presented but it's also intentionally jarring as Sandra is given no chance to be ready when the spotlight falls on her. 

The court structure of Anatomy of a Fall is enough to create a gripping legal story but it takes a truly great lead performance to bring it all together and that is certainly what we get from Sandra Huller as author Sandra Voyter. Though she maintains her innocence throughout the movie, you can sense that she's holding things back, hiding things away, and that leads you to, at the very least, wonder whether or not she could have killed her husband. The film smartly lays out the case of how the murder could have happened while deftly avoided a deliberate recreation that might tip the hand of the movie. 

Triet doesn't want us to see Sandra as the killer, even in a dream scenario. Rather, she allows the court case to frame our feelings about Sandra and allows the room for Huller to reveal the character, her flaws, and the reasons that might make her appear guilty. The court scenes in Anatomy of a Fall are so well done that you need little more than hearing about what is happening, placing you in direct connection with Daniel, the only fully innocent character in the movie. Torn between believing his mother and hearing horrible things about his mother and how she has slept around during her marriage to his father, Daniel struggles with the adult task of deciding what is true and not true about his mother. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media