Even before it entered its first weekend, the 76th Cannes Film Festival had claimed its first critical triumph and competition standout with "The Zone of Interest." An implacably chilling, entirely mesmerizing portrait of a family living in the shadow of the inferno, the movie was greeted at its Friday night gala premiere with rave reviews, crass Academy Awards speculation ("Has Director Jonathan Glazer Finally Hit the Oscar 'Zone' With 'Interest'?" wondered a Variety headline) and the usual meaningless gush about its lengthy standing ovation. The sustained applause was deserved but also, I suspect, a little incongruous. I'm glad to have seen Glazer's movie at a morning press screening that was noticeably absent any claps or cheers; as we stumbled out of the theater, silence seemed the only sane response.
Silence also feels appropriate following the news that the author Martin Amis, whose formidable oeuvre includes this movie's 2014 source novel, died Friday at the age of 73. Glazer's "Zone of Interest," it should be noted, is dramatically different from Amis', with which it shares little more than a title and a setting. Pared to the bone, the movie opens with several moments of pitch-black screen and the lushly dissonant surge of Mica Levi's score — an unsettling overture that prepares us not just to look, but to listen. (Levi also composed the music for Glazer's entrancing 2013 science-fiction masterpiece, "Under the Skin.")
As we're ushered into the quotidian rhythms of life at a comfortable two-story house in Poland, where a husband and wife live with their young children and a few servants, our ears can't help but pick up on a muted but unceasing chorus of background noises: high screams, barking dogs, crackling flames, clanging metal and not-infrequent gunfire. The meticulous sound design is matched by a visual style that Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, achieved by hiding cameras throughout the house and grounds, yielding a series of exactingly composed, fluidly edited static shots that at times suggest high-definition surveillance video.
