Banality of evil… living next door to Auschwitz
T‘Inside the wall is the embodiment of hell. Outside it is very much life as normal’
he director Jonathan Glazer is best known for big, glossy, commercial films such as Sexy Beast and Under The Skin. His latest, The Zone Of Interest, could not be more different. Played out in subtitled German and shot in a deliberately low-key, fly-on-the-wall style, it is set in the meticulously run house and well-tended gardens occupied by the family of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp.
The gas chambers and crematoria are literally next door, separated only by a high concrete wall topped by barbed wire. Inside – which Glazer never shows us – we know is the embodiment of hell. But outside in the Höss household it is very much suburban life as normal.
Nominated for five Oscars and nine Baftas, this powerful, brilliant and terrifyingly timely film is about the so-called ‘banality of evil’. How ordinary people can do terrible things simply because they fail to think fully through the consequences of their actions.
For Höss, beautifully underplayed by the German actor Christian Friedel, putting people to death has simply become an industrial process. Even better is Sandra Hüller as Höss’s wickedly deluded wife, a woman as happy to describe herself as ‘the queen of Auschwitz’ as she is to preen and pose in a freshly stolen fur coat.
Much of the film’s power comes from its meticulous sounddesign, with family life underpinned by the constant low thrum of furnaces and punctuated by distant gunshots.
The ending is haunting beyond belief.
Unmissable. Jeffrey Wright is one of Hollywood’s great supporting actors, so it’s wonderful seeing him getting the chance to shine in a leading role. And shine he does in American Fiction, a clever comedy that pokes as much gentle fun at certain elements of black American culture as it does at the white liberal audiences who so enthusiastically claim to enjoy it. Wright, whose Oscar nomination for Best Actor is one of five the film has received, plays Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, an academic and writer whose views on political correctness and ‘wokery’ are as out of step as his own writings are out of fashion. Suspended for upsetting a white student by his use of the n-word, he reluctantly travels to Boston to visit his family, still grumbling that the black experience seems to come down to being either a rapper, shot by the police or being proud but desperately poor.
Angry and frustrated, he rattles off a few chapters of the pseudoghetto style he so despises and sends it off to his agent under a fake name. Only to discover that the white publishing industry loves it.
He wants to own up, to expose their stupidity and greed, but a change in family circumstances suddenly leaves him in need of money…
Migration is the uninspiring title of a children’s cartoon about a family of ducks who fly south to Jamaica. Along the way they cross beaks with a pigeon, a parrot and a brace of frightening herons. Helped by a voice cast that includes Elizabeth Banks, Kumail Nanjiani and Danny DeVito, it turns out to be superior family fun, if a little frightening at times.
To have established one spyspoof franchise would be enough for most film-makers, and Matthew Vaughn has achieved that with Kingsman. But he comes badly unstuck with a would-be second, Argylle, that sees a miscast Bryce Dallas Howard playing a thriller writer whose James Bond-style novels – featuring a secret agent codenamed Argylle – are almost too good to be true. Unless…
Nope, it’s no good, despite Vaughn’s experience, the odd funny line and a cast that includes Sam Rockwell and Henry Cavill. It is a misconceived mess from unconvincing beginning to underwhelming end.