The Zone of Interest
Since the pure excess of Hacksaw Ridge back in 2016, I've found myself really grappling with the idea of the war film as spectacle. How do we ultimately come around to a conclusion about the strength of the human spirit and the horrors of war while simultaneously relishing in the bombast and inherent theatricality of large scale destruction? The Zone of Interest sees this interrogation through to the ultimate conclusion by backgrounding nearly all of the visceral depictions of the Holocaust into something surveillance-like and detached.
In doing this, I'm still trying to explain exactly how the experience of watching this "imagined" violence differs from seeing everything carried out in extreme detail. 133
The sickly feeling is still there, even though I'm not able to conjure any specific visual moment within my mind. It's a feeling that caught me off-guard, and has further entangled my thoughts on war film-making as an artistic entity. For what is seeks to do, The Zone of Interest is an extremely effective exercise in horror through sound design and subtractive imagery. 645