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Is it Horror? “The Zone of Interest” (2023)
Jonathan Glazer’s an interesting fellow. In twenty-four years, he’s made four features aside from countless commercials and music videos. His films have ranged from violent gangster comedy to metaphysical what-ifs to aliens walk among us horror. I count the latter among the best films of the 2010s.
So it was with no small amount of excitement that I anticipated Glazer’s latest, ten years on from Under the Skin. The Zone of Interest is a German-language film set in Poland during World War II, as far from the sun-drenched Cockney mafia of Sexy Beast as you can get, and miles removed from the austere Manhattan winterscape of Birth. But that’s fitting for Glazer, whose work regularly defies categorization. After casting Natasha Romanoff as a man-devouring extraterrestrial prowling the streets of Glasgow, an adaptation of Martin Amis’ 2014 “zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological” best-seller seems as logical a move as any.
Spoilers for The Zone of Interest follow.
Despite its Oscar nominations [ed. note: and wins, for Best International Feature and Best Sound], I don’t think a lot of people are going to see Zone. It is, first and foremost, a Holocaust film, albeit one that approaches the subject in a way that feels fresh and new. Which is to say, this is not Schindler’s List, and that’s a good thing. There’s no…
