Between the pandemic, studio greed and America’s love of franchise, Hollywood has become a bit of a bedazzled cadaver: bloated, leaky, beginning to rot as summer heat approaches. But the makeup is perfect.
But Covid brought new life to other forms of sequestered living. Television is in a new golden era. Streaming created a new Hollywood power broker, the influencer. And everyone and their drunk half-cousin started a podcast.
America’s audio revival could not have come sooner. True Crime is as popular a genre in the U.S. as, well, true crime as an activity. And none come truer — or more horrific — than The Zone of Interest, a rare movie that is more powerful audibly than visually. It’s radio theater with virtual reality effects. This is a movie to be experienced twice: once with captions; once without.
Directed by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast); Zone examines the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, who strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
In a sublime decision, Zone doesn’t show a single death. Instead, it pulls a reverse Schindler’s List, the Oscar-winning masterpiece that was shot entirely in black and white, save for one Jewish girl in a red dress.
Here, we get muted colors, and the Jewish girl in a dress is cast in negative-contrast light as she rushes to feed her Polish village by sneaking food under the cloak of night.
More moving, though, is the sound that undergirds Zone. As Hedwig explains the garden to her mother-in-law, we hear the anguished cries of women and children being herded to the gas chambers (more than 1.1 million died in Auschwitz) just beyond the garden wall. As Joseph goes bird hunting on the grounds, we hear the crack of executional gunfire. The steady grind of the crematoriums is a nauseating white noise.
Some critics, particularly young ones, have dismissed the film as a foley stunt in an overdone genre. Conservative douche Ben Shapiro raked it for not showing a single Jewish death.
Apparently, Ben didn’t get the point of the story. Zone takes an intentionally clinical look at the task of murdering millions, from the paperwork to transportation to counting cash and gold-filled teeth. That the words then find purchase now is downright chilling.
It makes for a terrifying cacophony.
