ZONE OF INTEREST (GERMAN: ENGLISH SUBTITLES) CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Director Jonathan Glazer has accomplished the remarkable in his adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel of the same title (which bears little resemblance to Amis’s script).  The film resonates, pierces the psyche, transcends the scenario, adept performances, it sears redolently with the SOUND of the unimaginable; eyes shut, the soundtrack bleats with symphonic chords of horror, annihilation, ethnic elimination; Mica Levi’s inimitable soundtrack reverberates with furnaces groaning, humans howling, dogs snarling, and gunshots piercing tranquility; all the while the “banality of evil” is thriving beyond the wall in the idyllic domicile of Commandant Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller) Hoss; blissfully living, a utopian existence, with their expected flaxen progeny, comfortable in the perpetual murder of millions of Jews, and at ease donning their clothes and jewelry. 

A firmament speckled with souls of the just, streams peppered with their unrequited dreams, hovering, harboring a “zone” of iniquity. Hoss, a devoted parent consoles his somnambulist daughter by reading Grimm’s fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”; an animated, metaphorical Gretel escapes the Shoah, rescues her brother and the “witch” (Nazism) meets her incendiary demise.

Of all the Holocaust films “Zone of Interest” recognizes the viewers license to interpret the narrative, divine its lessons, but above all, crucially, to fervently remember.

FOUR & ½ STARS!!!!

Peneflix