2/2/24 - Zone of Interest (2023) - 7-9/10

I don’t know the last film I saw that felt as unique, mystifying, and nebulous (I say these last to adjectives knowing exactly what its intent and execution was, its rather what it evokes inside and what tarried in the back of my brain) as this porthole into human poison. I almost can’t rate it, which I’m sure would delight some of my friends who don’t believe in “rating” art - this just stands apart within my expressive capabilities for the cinematic artform. It is an experience and one in which when I left the theater I was not only speechless but I didn’t WANT to speak about it. I suppose on some deeper level it was truly affecting and impressed cinematically upon me an altogether intimate & individual encounter.

The family life, with its untold intricacies, was humbly manifested by Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller to embody a stoic anesthetized monstrousness flourishing in their horrific home but it was the bold and unorthodox flourishes of Glazer that captivated. Audacious music and color pallet swapping solidly juxtapose the inane mundanity slithering the garden of the film. It strikes and reverberates through you, sometimes with only an odd sense of the otherworldly. Be it the stark colors painting the screen, the infrared hopeful fruit philanthropist, or the pairing of anachronistic visions now of those places peaking into the fictional reality of the film, Glazer and editor Paul Watts strike chords of subversive jarrings. But they pale in scope and totality to the soundscape which is the noxious fumes this film thrives on. The sound design is one of constant horror; an unacknowledge and uncommented upon lingering murmur of death, torture and suffering that bleeds into every pore of story and emotion. If that wasn’t enough it is conjoined to the cacophonous droning chants and ghastly score of Micah Levi, a master of her form.

It is a cumulative sublime portrait of cratering darkness in its murky depths - a message of humans’ inhumanity and the lingering unhealthy possibilities of the worst that we can be without fervent accedence but vile blithe indifference. This would be an admirable inclusion in the “Paul Schrader death to us all” watchlist.