We must all become better participants in watching movies. If you want to improve at watching movies, movies like The Zone of Interest are still being made for you. You can watch them if you want to improve at this. What does it mean to be better at watching movies? For me, it means that we need to watch movies with intention. When the screen is black, when there is no image there, but an exceptionally dense piece of music by Mica Levi hangs over the screen, the fact you are hearing and are not seeing is the purpose. Nothing can be wrong about this segment because it is perfect, a loaded statement built off of an audiovisual motif that will drive the rest of the movie. It’s not about what you’re about to see while watching The Zone of Interest. It’s about what you do not see and you do hear and what you do with that information when you receive it.

The first step of watching movies with intention is finding movies where every frame is built out of intention. That way you can be sure you’re always reading something that is there or purposefully not there or that is boiling just below the surface. For the breadth of the runtime, The Zone of Interest is doing all three of these things at once. It has a foreground, a background, and a third layer, a sonic background filled in by what we know coming into the film and the horrors that we can imagine.

Think of the good horror films and how those use your imagination, too, as a means of participating in cinema. What they do is “direct the audience,” through sharp visual cues and layers of information. They play with foreground, background, and the audio layer, because all three parts are actually at the forefront and always together when watching a horror movie. What you need is the perceived reality in front of the camera, the objective world that also belongs to us. Then, you need the part that breaks reality down into genre parts: this shattering of suspended disbelief, this sense of permeating dread, this suggestion of what is to come. Maybe you pepper details about that around in the background but you do not need to draw any attention to it because the audience is already participating in the game. They know what tools you have under strict control, as a director of these pieces, and someone who controls every visual element that comes on the screen. And then, there is always the visual layer, which is where horror becomes the greatest genre to do any multi-layered story about the human condition because it has the perfectly coiled tension give-and-take that no other genre is worthy of because every other genre seems to operate on only one layer of belief, they do not let the wolf in, where horror opens the door.

Let’s continue thinking about these layers and what they do. In The Zone of Interest, the camera does not operate like it does in movies. It operates like it does in reality television programs or in surveillance — the cameras are plotted strategically to capture life being lived but importantly, this is not merely a cinematic construction (although by its nature, it now is). It seems as though the cameras have their own frame of existence in this space, their own layer of meaning and suggestion in where they are placed, what they film, and what film has been edited together into this movie. Given how the movie is shot so often out of these more static or realistic angles, there is always something out of frame. There is never any misplaced lens or wrong way of shooting the movie. Each thing has been so expertly considered that you almost lose the person behind the camera. Which is an intense artistic statement in itself.

What we are shown also matters. What we are shown is a garden outside of a Nazi concentration camp. The lifestyle of the people who tend to that garden and the people who come in and out of their life. The proximity is the point but also what we are shown is the point, too. This is the part where every review should note that the film is really about the “banality of evil” or “feeding the right wolf,” but those are only a couple ideas of what the film is doing, and only one or two of the things it is doing at any time.

It is helpful that Jonathan Glazer always wants to push the movie. It would not be enough to adapt the very good Martin Amis novel The Zone of Interest (2014), that’s not how stories work, and Jonathan Glazer understands that. The movie is only a part of the book and is only a part of that part of the book. It is a tone piece about the part of the book that centers itself upon a new perspective just outside the concentration camp. An outlier in both form and adaptation, this presents a different sense of subjectivity and interiority than what the book provided. In many ways, it is wholly its own separate piece now, and escapes any easy parallels where you can give a text-to-text comparison.

Every part of The Zone of Interest comes off just as elegantly as that. If you are watching with intention, which it requires you to do, then you will know all this right away. Mica Levi’s score will tell you all of this in the beginning, and when it strikes through the air, and reinstates for the rest of the film. Levi’s score travels across time and history and reconnects the audience with trauma of the past and present, just as we see current events bridging the gap, so too does The Zone of Interest. It is almost a miracle that it has arrived how it has, when it has, and that it has flown under the radar as one of the most accomplished movies of our time. The Zone of Interest requires your zone of interest. It’s a museum trip: watch it with curiosity, a want to understand, and perhaps even reverence. All movies are art but this one is an expansive multi-layered masterpiece from Jonathan Glazer. Come and listen.

10/10