Film reviews: The Zone of Interest | American Fiction | Migration

Based on Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel of the same name, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest brilliantly uses the abstractions of the art movie to dramatise the banality of evil, writes Alistair Harkness

The Zone of Interest (12A) ****

American Fiction (15) **

Migration (U) *

There’s not all that much to “get" in The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s multi-Oscar nominated adaptation of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel of the same name. For all its considerable cinematic flair it arrives at its central, horrifying conceit fairly swiftly and never wavers from following it through to its numbing endpoint.

Setting the film mostly on the edges of Auschwitz, Glazer’s first images are ones of bucolic bliss as a German family – mum, dad, their various children – enjoy a picnic near a beautiful lake before retreating (after a grim discovery in the water) to their well-appointed home. Its Edenic garden, we soon realise, shares a barbed wire-topped wall with the concentration camp, though the tops of the chimneys billowing out smoke are the only other structures Glazer permits us to see. Instead the film embeds us with that aforementioned family, the Hösses, headed up by Rudolf (Christian Friedel), Auschwitz’s real-life commandant, and his wife Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), who revels in her nickname “the queen of Auschwitz” and takes great pride in tending to her garden, looking after her children and entertaining the friends who pop over to share in the abundance of goods sourced from the camp’s inmates.

All of this is presented matter-of-factly, with almost surveillance-like detachment. Yet working with his Under the Skin sound designer Johnnie Burn and composer Mica Levi, Glazer underscores the grotesque irony of what we’re watching with a near-constant soundtrack of appalling ambience: screams, gunshots, the chilling hiss of the gas chambers – abhorrent noises to which the Hösses react the way normal people might to the white noise of bustling city. That, however, is the point. There have been so many films about the Holocaust at this juncture that conventional cinema has long since exhausted its limited capacity to depict its barbarity. Stripping away much of Amis’s source novel, what Glazer does instead is use the abstractions of the art movie to dramatise what Hannah Arendt termed "the banality of evil” so that this overused phrase itself regains some meaning.

The mundane minutiae of the Höss family’s daily existence is shocking not because we know what’s going on behind those walls but because we see the extent to which they do too, be it in the language they use to normalise it or the emotional barriers they construct to process it, children included. As the film progresses, we also see tiny fissures emerge in those defences, but at no point are we expected to identify with any of them; there are no close-ups, none of them undergo a transformative reckoning. Whatever kindness exists in film is relegated to the quietly heroic actions of a young girl seen in hallucinatory interludes, the negative film stock Glazer uses another way of capturing this world’s distorted, inverted reality. It’s an audacious approach, one that builds to an unexpected ending that forces us to confront the extent to which such atrocities can’t and shouldn’t be forgotten or obscured.

Zone of Interest

Based on Percival Everett’s scalpel sharp, very funny 2001 novel Erasure, American Fiction is a rather timid, disappointingly broad satirical sideswipe at the institutional racism at the heart of the US publishing industry, one that picks at some fairly low-hanging fruit, and, unlike the book, doesn’t seem to have a particularly great understanding of the world it’s attempting to eviscerate. That it provides Jeffrey Wright with an all-too-rare leading role (for which he’s been Oscar-nominated) is a minor blessing that only reinforces how weak the rest of the film is in comparison.

He plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a literary professor and writer of dense, experimental fiction that no one reads and that his agent has a hard time selling because it doesn’t trade in the demeaning, exploitative stereotypes that white readers and critics applaud with superlatives about “rawness” and “authenticity”. Bristling at the way he’s expected to define himself by his race in everything he does, he cranks out a crude fictionalised memoir of a lowly criminal, written in the urban patois he’s recently seen celebrated in a new bestseller, wincingly titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.

In the tradition of Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, Monk’s own satirical exercise in bad taste, initially titled “My Pafology” is embraced without irony and becomes a runaway success. Partly motivated by the financial burden imposed on him by a recent family tragedy, he goes along with the farce. So does the film, until debut writer/director Cord Jefferson runs out of ideas and starts focussing on the inevitable movie adaptation of the book, liberally borrowing from Robert Altman’s The Player with no real awareness that the meta film he thinks he’s making is the sort The Player railed against – the kind that pulls its punches.

Kids’ movie Migration could be written off as yet another dumbed down Pixar clone if latter-day Pixar films weren’t already fulfilling that remit. So let’s just say it’s a dated, Finding Nemo-esque fable about an overly cautious father (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) learning to loosen the apron strings a little at the urging of his adventurous wife (Elizabeth Banks) and rambunctious children (Caspar Jennings, Tresi Gazal). The fact they’re all ducks is neither here nor there since the creative team behind this barrel-scraping drivel (including The White Lotus creator/School of Rock writer Mike White) have zero interest in rooting their characters’ antics in actual avian behaviour. Awkwafina and Danny DeVito fill out the voice cast.

All films are on general release from 2 February