The Zone of Interest, a British, American and Polish production directed by Jonathan Glazer, begins with a scene of bucolic bliss: a German-speaking family picnicking on a riverbank on a summer day. The specifics of character and dialogue are less important – you can barely catch the thread of conversation, anyway – than of the family’s mood: peace, tranquility, ease; on the father’s part, a note of concern. There have been a handful of recent films – Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things, Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – that have excellently refuted the tyranny of story in how we evaluate cinema, emphasising visual language, sound, rhythm, feeling to hypnotise, immerse and impart. The Zone of Interest, the deserved winner of this year’s Oscar for best international film, is the sharpest of these less plot-predominant films, and to the most nauseating end.
For the horror begins to creep into the frame as soon as the family returns to their house, a stately villa situated just beside a towering concrete wall. There’s a plume of smoke from the other side. A wordless, sickly looking man delivers supplies in a gray uniform. And there is a relentless, churning background chorus of screams, grunts, grinds and gunshots.
