SONNY BUNCH: The Zone of Interest Review.

This is going to sound perverse, but the film’s very conceit almost treats Holocaust knowledge like comic book movies treat in-universe lore: as something in the background for knowledgeable audiences to pick up on. “Ah yes, here’s the manufacturer Siemens working with Höss, can you believe they’re still a going concern?” “Do you hear that piece of music the camp worker is playing? ‘Sunbeams’? It’s a piece that was actually written in and rescued from Auschwitz, did you know that?” “Oh, did you hear that woman say she found a diamond in a bottle of toothpaste? Yes, there were many efforts to save family wealth; none of them worked.”

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I FIND THE ZONE OF INTEREST somewhat flummoxing. Glazer has undoubtedly made a masterpiece of not-showing. For those who are familiar with the horror of the Holocaust, it will be a deeply unsettling work, less about the banality of evil than the willing acceptance of it; there are few moments from recent cinema more chilling than when Hedwig, having suffered a humiliation, tells a housekeeper that her husband could spread her ashes over the fields. In that taunt, she reveals not just her complicity but her active desire to hurt her enemies. The cruelty is the point, and all that.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder what the one-in-five young Americans who think the Holocaust was exaggerated will make of the very act of not-showing. I can’t help but wonder what the teachers who have noted a rise in antisemitic humor and students ironically praising Hitler as based will respond to it. Or how such a film will be received in a period of soaring antisemitism. Assuming knowledge that either isn’t there or has been warped by the vicissitudes of the online swamp alters the cinematic calculus in ways that I am not entirely sure how to grapple with.

Sadly, Bunch’s question was answered in 1995 and a much more conventional film about the Holocaust: Students’ Laughter Angers Schindler’s List Viewers.

When Steven Spielberg released his gritty “Schindler’s List,” he hoped the film about the Holocaust would provoke a range of responses, from horror to despair to anger. Laughter was not one of them.

But because of their ignorance of the subject, a group of high school students broke into giggles while watching the film during a field trip to an Oakland theater this week. In what appears to be a clash of cultures and generations, theater managers ousted the Castlemont High School students after other moviegoers complained that they were laughing loudly and contemptuously after one of the movie’s most affecting scenes.

“They were laughing at people being murdered by Nazis, laughing out loud,” said Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater. “People were shaking with anger. The issue was: They weren’t permitting other patrons to enjoy the movie.”

School administrators and teachers, however, accuse the theater and the media of blowing the incident out of proportion. They claimed that the laughter was not disruptive and sprang from a nervous, immature reaction to the depiction of a brutal execution.

“We told [students] that they were going to see a movie of a serious nature and they were to act appropriately,” said Tanya Dennis, Castlemont’s dean of students. But, she added, they couldn’t help but be shocked by the scene.

Needless to say, Zone of Interest isn’t a film for most teens. For the rest of us, it’s a hypnotic, if at times far too mannered a film that illustrates Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” trope through an extremely difficult 104 minutes of viewing.