In the Dark Reviews

In adapting Martin Amis' 2014 novel, "The Zone of Interest" to the big screen, writer-director Jonathan Glazer takes seriously the phrase, "the banality of evil," originally popularized by Hannah Arendt in 1963. Arendt and Glazer express the legacy of the Nazis during World War II by focusing on how they hid their evil in plain sight, behind a screen of domestic mundanity.

Glazer's adaptation of "The Zone of Interest" lacks a plot, as it centers on German SS officer Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their household of children, servants and extended family, in the comfortably well-appointed home they've established right next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp, over which Höss serves as commandant.

This is a difficult film to watch, not due to the explicitness of its details, but rather the restraint with which it discloses such details. The horrors of the camp are never shown on screen, but they remain inescapable by how crudely they're blocked from view, with a gray wall shielding Höss' idyllic cottage and garden from all but the upper levels of the camp buildings, as they belch ash into the sky.

The Höss family is introduced enjoying the pastoral countryside and splashing in the stream, before we see the kids getting trundled off to school, and their parents giggling over memories of resort vacations past.

Even Höss' workplace discussions, about the engineering of the camp's crematoriums, are intentionally rendered with just enough technical detail to almost mute the fact that these men are devoting such hyper-focused attention to the task of committing genocide more efficiently.

Rudolf and Hedwig consider their home next to Auschwitz to be such a paradise on Earth that they're legitimately heartbroken when a career promotion threatens to take them away from it all, even as Glazer takes care to ensure the background audio of all the Hösses' scenes at home are rarely free from the shouts, screams, gunfire and other noises from the camp.

Indeed, when human remains from the camp filter into the river, where the children swim and play, Rudolf remonstrates the camp personnel for their carelessness, but otherwise, it's merely treated as the flip side of the coin, from when Hedwig harvests the camp inmates' belongings.

Even without revealing Rudolf's actions on the ground within the camp itself, the Höss family as a whole is depicted as passively predatory, with servants washing the blood off Rudolf's boots, and Hedwig threatening to have her domestic help reduced to cremated ashes in a fit of pique.

Glazer hammers home that such inhumanity was so normalized in middle-class Nazi German society that, when he shares a scene of a Polish girl secretly planting food in camp inmates' work sites after dark, he renders the visuals with a striking black-and-white night-vision effect.

As close as a film like this can come to an upbeat resolution is a jarring flash-forward scene, which subjects the self-satisfied Rudolf Höss to the karmic comeuppance of possibly perceiving a future in which his achievements indeed made history, but not for the reasons he had hoped.

'MotU: Revolution' miniseries evolves '80s toys

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, if you're an overgrown Eighties adult-child like me, a much-needed palate-cleanser to the necessary message of "The Zone of Interest" can be found in generational nostalgia, as Netflix has followed its 2021 "Masters of the Universe: Revelation" 10-part animated miniseries with a recently released five-part continuation, "Revolution."

"The Zone of Interest" serves as an essential reminder that we can't allow ourselves to be blinded to the inhumane treatment of others, regardless of our own fortunate circumstances, while "Revolution" takes a bunch of silly characters who were created to sell cheap plastic toys and uses them to explore dilemmas such as how to step up to the adult responsibilities of our parents, without simply repeating the same mistakes they made.

A number of "Masters of the Universe" fans expressed qualms with how "Revelation" handled their beloved touchstones, but I think they'll find "Revolution" more to their liking, as it continues to incorporate various scattered and disparate elements of this franchise into a unified, cohesive mythos, while rounding out previously absurd caricatures into more fully realized characters.

To that end, it's appropriate that the best voice-acting performance in "Revolution" is delivered by William Shatner, because in his old age, the once-hyperbolic Captain Kirk has gained depth, deftness and gravitas in his line delivery, making his character one of the most fascinating to watch so far.

What's most heartening about "Revolution" is that our muscle-bound strongman hero finally resolves his feud with his most devoted foe through an act of healing, but then again, in spite of his stereotypical name, He-Man was always a model of nontoxic masculinity.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]