Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: The Zone of Interest

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia, from November 3 to 19. Joshua Polanski will be reviewing for Midwest Film Journal live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.

I’m not convinced that The Zone of Interest, the first film in a decade from provocateur Jonathan Glazer, is a film about the banality of evil per se. It’s more of a horrific record of of the banality — and that distinction matters.

To put it another way, it is too simple to frame the film as a cinematic realization of Hannah Arendt’s observation of the Adolf Eichmann trial, where the key organizer of the Holocaust thought of himself as only “doing his job.” Glazer takes the philosophical insight of the “banality of evil,” as Arendt first coined, as the building brick of his latest horror masterpiece. The record of that banality feeds the narrative material of what must be described as a horror film.

Depending on how one counts it, it’s the second (or maybe third) Shoah film I’ve seen at PӦFF. But it’s also not really a Shoah film — although in a different sort of way than One Life is not really a Shoah film. The latter, like Stanley Kubrick’s critique of Schindler’s List, isn’t really a Holocaust film in the sense that it’s about people who escaped the Holocaust; it’s more about a hopeful non-annihilation for some. The Zone of Interest, based on a sub-theme of Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, isn’t a Shoah film in the same way that a serial killer film without any murders can’t be properly considered a crime film. It’s not even about the killer — Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss — as a killer but as a human person, a husband, a father, an office worker.

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.