The Zone of Interest | Telescope Film
The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest

Critic Rating

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User Rating

  • United Kingdom,
  • Poland,
  • United States
  • 2023
  • · 135m

Director Jonathan Glazer
Cast Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel
Genre Drama, History, War

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife, Hedwig, attempt to build a home for their family in the Polish countryside against the walls of Nazi Germany's most infamous death camp.

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What are users saying?

Ben Schlotman

This is a profoundly chilling depiction of the banality of Nazi evil and how it related to their vision for an ideal life. The moments of ostensible normalcy contrasted with the horrors of the Holocaust literally occurring next door create a deeply resonant message that one can apply to any atrocity from history or contemporary times.

What are critics saying?

100

Time Out by Dave Calhoun

It’s a stunning film – thoughtful, challenging and disturbing.

100

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.

100

Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson

Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time.

100

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond.

100

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

At this point it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Jonathan Glazer is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original.

100

The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor

It’s a shocking piece of audio-visual art that only further cements Glazer as one of the 21st century’s most original and influential filmmakers.

100

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Theodor Adorno famously wrote. Glazer’s film gives us the prosaic instead, refashioning it into the darkest, most vital sort of art it might be possible for us as a species to produce.

100

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

The Zone of Interest is possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way.

100

CineVue by John Bleasdale

Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.

100

BBC by Nicholas Barber

In some ways, the film resembles an abyss-black absurdist comedy sketch or a video art installation. It could be said that its sole observation is the continual co-existence of grotesque cruelty and blithe workaday life, but it makes that observation with such rigorous formal control and unblinking dedication that its power to shock never diminishes.

91

The Playlist by Gregory Ellwood

This is a film you can dissect for hours. A movie full of details and creative choices that will spur debate and passion. Another work of Glazer’s full of images that may haunt you for weeks. And well worth almost the decade it took to get here.

91

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

The Zone of Interest insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

80

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history.