A scene from the movie “The Zone of Interest.”
(A24)
The best of this year’s best picture nominees — and I offer that up with zero equivocation — is also the one most surprising by its inclusion. Or is it? There’s a cynical argument to be made that, even 30 years after “Schindler’s List,” the academy still can’t resist a Holocaust movie. But one of the most striking things about Jonathan Glazer’s (latest) masterwork is the degree to which it shuns, challenges and even reinvents that designation. If this chillingly methodical portrait of an Auschwitz-adjacent Nazi household counts as a Holocaust movie, it’s a Holocaust movie by subtraction, in which the mass murders being committed just over the garden wall are concealed from our eyes (though not from our ears, attuned as they are to every mechanized rumble of Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers’ Oscar-nominated soundscape and every hellish strain of Mica Levi’s score). He manages this through a brilliantly oblique rethink of Martin Amis’ 2014 novel (rightly recognized with an adapted screenplay nomination), as well as through a faultless collaboration with the cinematographer Łukasz Żal, the editor Paul Watts and the actors Christian Friedel and Hüller.
It’s possible that, in the weeks to come, you might hear “The Zone of Interest” described as both the toughest of this year’s best picture nominees, which is true, and a hard movie to watch, which is false. Really, what gives the movie its creepily insinuating power is how easy it is to watch, how mesmerized we are by Glazer’s quietly damning surveillance of this family. Brilliantly stripping down Amis’ novel to its cold, crystalline essence (his adapted screenplay nomination is well earned), Glazer works in faultless concert with Żal, Watts and Friedel and Hüller, whose razor-honed work as a Nazi power couple betray a bone-deep understanding of just how unexceptional human evil is.
In the aforementioned absence of “Anatomy of a Fall” from the international feature race, “The Zone of Interest” will almost certainly win that category with ease. A best picture win would be even more deserved, not least for reminding us that the lessons of fascism, to say nothing of the rewards of great cinema, hardly belong to any one country alone.
