Published: 26 May 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
An unusual Holocaust story is “a blood-freezing treatise on the banality of evil”; film about Jewish boy kidnapped by papal authorities ‘‘looks like a classic”
Films of Jewish interest have made an impact at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Winner of the Grand Prix , festival's second prize, was The Zone of Interest, which explores the family life of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss, who lived a comfortable, middle-class life inside the concentration camp.
The film is based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis – who died the day after the film premiered.
The BBC’s Nicholas Barber described the film, by director Jonathan Glazer, as “a blood-freezing treatise on the banality of evil".
The film opens with Höss’s wife Hedwig showing her mother around her “paradise garden” inside Auschwitz. “The women's quiet, middle-class chit-chat could hardly be more ordinary, but it's rendered dizzyingly surreal and deeply horrific by certain details that they don't seem to notice: the grey, barbed wire-topped wall on one side of the garden; the barracks and the belching chimney just beyond it; and the constant background noise of industrial rumbling, steam trains chuffing, some intermittent shouting, and the occasional echoing gunshot.
“Slowly and steadily, without any big, sudden reveal, we learn Rudolf Höss, his wife, and their young children have a contented, healthy, if slightly boring life while thousands of people are killed daily just a few feet away.”
Barber gave The Zone of Interest five stars. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw ranked it four stars, noting, “It really has the scalp-prickling quality of a bad dream or a fairytale.”
Bradshaw gave five stars to another film of Jewish interest at Cannes: Kidnapped, by 83-year-old Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio.
