Review: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Rudolf and Hedwig live in a beautiful country house close to a river which is great for the kids. Hedwig has really got into her garden which is a mix of floral beauty and practical mini crops. Every day, Rudolf goes to work in the the big smelly factory over the wall but that is what pays the bills. If the routine seems a little stiff and repetitive it at least keeps everything buzzing in a sober and predictable way and if the pair can seem a little formal with the kids their pillow talk is warm and engaging. Then, Rudolf gets a promotion and has to move everyone. Hedwig stands her ground on the house she has done so much to build into a perfect home. But the bosses are the bosses and he'll have to work something out. Oops, sorry, forgot to mention, the big factory over the wall is the Auschwitz death camp and Rudolf is its commandant. It's World War II and the sunny serenity of this life fuels the engines of industrialised mass murder.

So, you'd think, idyllic on one side of the wall, hell on earth on the other; roll end credits. But the point of this film is to live with these people and watch them. You are free to judge them, as all history has, but once you get over that you might just be overtaken by your fascination. When Hedwig takes delighted delivery of fine clothes, she gets the pick of them in a huge fur coat while the local servants are given lingerie items to choose. Late at night, on the top bunk bed, the older son uses a torch, not to read a comic but to look at and play with extracted teeth with gold fillings.

At no point are we led to believe that these people, even the kids, are unaware of what happens over the wall. While we see none of it directly on screen, the audio is constantly haunted by the sounds of gun fire, barking dogs and sergeants, and massive machinery. While we grasp with relief at Rudolf's concern over daily matters and his relatable anxiety as he delays telling Hedwig about the move, we also listen as he near-erotically tell his wife over the phone how he imagines gassing everyone at the lavish Nazi reception he's attending (we see them in a startling extreme high shot), how the problem to solve is to deal with the high ceiling.  There is none of the cognitive dissonance suggested by Hannah Arendt's coinage "banality of evil" (itself long blanched by overuse): it is a life of choice.

Jonathon Glazer, a director whose work is very much film by film rather than an auteurist whole, is an ace at Kubrickian world building. Take the house and garden out of the context and we'd go to that air bnb without a second thought. The house is pristine but really feels lived in. The constant smokestack with its infernal glow and thick black plumes keep the context running without an off switch. Hedwig's mother is haunted by the sight, she wakes and goes to the window at night, staring into the fire and smoke with what looks like a nausea she will know until her last breath. When we see Rudolf in the grand settings of Nazi homebase, he walks along corridors and staircases that are so solid and intimidating that one slip would surely end in a major fracture. The uniformed clerks of genocide move through the halls and ornate interiors they seem disturbingly made for them. The single act of resistance is shown in a stark negative process as a girl hides fruit in the soil of the work areas around the camp. One of these sequences uses the widescreen to the full as she does this beneath the slivery plumes of exhaust from the prisoner trains clanking overhead. The quiet heroism of it and the refusal to use conventional cinematic triggers to enhance it make it deliver a gut punch.

The dialogue is mostly in German (no Cherman eccented English which would have distracted) and the cast is either German or Polish as the characters are. Christian Friedel as Rudolf delivers a man of his circumstances, vulnerable here to the protean forces in his family life and icily efficient in the carriage of his career. It is a thanklessly nuanced performance. Sandra Huller, though, is the heart of the film and also the poster girl of its proffered puzzle. Far from resting as the baby-machine the Reich demanded she be, she is a fiery homemaker and obstinate ruler of her lebensraum (a Nazi-era term she makes poignant use of in an argument with Rudolf) and she is, without a moment's ambiguity, a Nazi from the marrow out: she delivers this shock in steady doses so we never quite feel numbed by it, but shock is what it is.

We still need art about atrocities. In an era where we are shocked by the continued incidence of military violence, it is well to be reminded that we are still not very far from sticks and stones and that the volume of millennia has not lifted us beyond all that. And when we find ourselves back, looking on like drivers around a pile up, it is well we recall how the smoke over the wall is made. Glazer has given us another reminder. I had feared on going in that I was in for a flat moving art installation of a movie but when the frozen opening of Mica Levi's extraordinary music against a dark, featureless background gave way to the glistening riverside idyll, I knew I was in good hands. There is warmth here. There probably shouldn't be, but it's what keeps us watching and then it's also what starts to worry us. And that's only right.

Review: ALL OF US STRANGERS

Blocked screenwriter Adam stares at an empty screen in his flat and procrastinates when his building alarm goes off. While on the street he looks up at the tower and notices a man also in his thirties who hasn't evacuated. He's standing at the window, looking down at Adam. It's not just curiosity. Back home after the all clear, Adam answers a knock at the door. It's the man in the window, Harry, pleasantly drunk from the connoisseur bottle of whisky he's flailing with. While the doorstep encounter is warm, Adam declines the company and closes the door.

In a homage to his own past, perhaps for writer's inspiration, Adam takes a train back to his childhood hometown. There he meets his parents, the ones who died in a car accident when he was ten. They recognise him and ask him in. After a pleasant evening of catching up he returns to his London flat and, emboldened by his experience, finds Harry and they let each other in.

Adam enjoys the intimacy with Harry as someone who has done without love for too long and it drives him to return to his parents in their home on the border of mortality and grief. Adam comes out to his mother who, though young in appearance struggles to conceal her 1980s panic. Later, his father is begrudgingly accepting. Later still, you know where this is going. Except you don't.

It reminds me of an affectation I have whenever I see an old tv. It might be a portable or an old furniture-scaled box with a bulging screen and a numbered dial for the stations (including the never used 5A). These might be part of a retro-style display at someone's place or part of the cute decor in a cafe but the effect on me is always the same: I want to be able to switch it on and watch old television. Not just the shows but the news and the commercials. There's an ache that comes with this but it's not just nostalgia, it's more of a cry of frustration. Somewhere between the goopy old fashions and the darker iterations of dodgy values comedy that would sour any fond recollection, there's a chance to grab the missteps and interpersonal atrocities and smooth their spiky edges into harmony. That's what I was feeling when I watched this intricate and mesmerising film. Adam's loneliness and grief have him building monsters and heroes even when everyone looks and sounds normal, when everything just keeps looking beautiful. There's a scene near the climax that might start taking you out of the film but I'd advise you to just hang on and let it do its work. It's worth it.

There are only four speaking parts in this film and each is given crucial material for the construction of the whole. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are the parents, conveying the difficult status of being both past and present at once, awestruck at their own appearance but with clearly delineated characters continuing through the lost years. Paul Mescal's Harry gets us to the danger point between a yearning attraction and recklessness. But the weight of the film is on Andrew Scott's shoulders. It is an intense performance of a character whose action almost entirely takes place inside his skull, but Scott builds this from the gravity of his portrayal of constant, endless loneliness. Like the distorted image he hallucinates of his childhood self with a head warped by reflection into a Francis Bacon scream, he demands our unfaltering attention. We grab at moments of levity and warmth like crumbs, knowing that we will soon return to his swollen base of pain. That might not read as a great recommendation for anyone seeking a cosy escape into whimsy but the richness of it will soon have you keeping up.

All of Us Strangers fills a need to examine grief and how addictive it is. That it does so with such expertly drawn interplay between characters in pain of loneliness and others racked by fear of their own place in the time that must leave them behind in the universe is a credit to Andrew Haigh's writing and direction and brings him to a peak in his studies of humanity at an intimate remove. You might think it's not one to see if you're at a low ebb but I can promise without spoilers that the quiet apotheosis in its final moments will lift you.

All of Us Strangers is currently in cinemas.

ALIEN @ 45

Industrial ship The Nostromo is on its way back to Earth when it receives a distress signal. The crew is thawed out of hibernation and goes to investigate. They find the wreck of a huge ship that contains a fossilised giant at the controls and a massive chamber of egg-shaped objects. One of the team goes in for a close-up and gets one of the hatchlings, a kind of scorpion crab, right in the face. Back on board, the thing eventually dries up and falls off. Then at lunch it's next stage makes a spectacular entrance. That signal, was it a distress call or a warning?

Ridley Scott's second feature is a lean and mean organism (apologies to anyone who thought I was going to write "machine"). His previous was The Duellists, an engaging epic of persistent aggression over decades in the Napoleonic era. Costuming and setting aside, Alien isn't a million conceptual miles away. There is a core of violence to both that is handled to great fascination. What Scott added to progress his own practice was to keep it minimal. Like spacecraft design itself, there would be no room for anything inessential; this wasn't a saga, it was a slasher and it would enter cinema history as one of the best. Even its opening sequence of the slowly completing letters of the title against the background of a dark ringed planet. At first (to Jerry Goldsmith's eerie score) they look like an off world alphabet but, piece by slowly appearing piece, they spell out what we're already feeling.

Dan O'Bannon's screenplay is similarly lean but it suggests universes. Unfairly described as a rip off of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, O'Bannon wrote of colonisation, interstellar commerce, gritty industry, and enterprise bargaining as a bed to what only needed to be a monster movie. And those other things, the world building, add enough grimy realism to allow its audiences to forget about all the sci-fi on screen as the survival story keeps them at their seats' edge.

The third essential element was the design of H. R. Giger. The Swiss artist brought his painstaking and disturbing aesthetic and rendered the film impossible to forget with its machine organic ick. Debbie Harry had inadvertently supplied the title of her solo album when shown Giger's cover art: Koo Koo. So we see spaceships with large vaginal entrances, rows of vertebral spikes as interior design, and an alien that prevented all future contenders from looking like actors in suits. Giger's alien (later dubbed the xenomorph which is a Greeker way of saying alien) had aspects of deadly insects, reptiles, the big cats, and something more distressingly mechanical. When it opens its fanged mouth another mouth extends and its like a razor toothed eel. It's tail is active, spinal prehensile and penetrating. It speeds across the floor but climbs like a snake. It's also hard to envisage as it's almost entirely seen in shadow. This was a practical decision as the complex animatronics needed to operate the Alien meant that it was impractical to build a complete body that moved the way the creature needed to. There are a few shots of the entire body but they obey the balance of sight vs articulation by being static. 

Despite the awestriking work this took to realise, the film takes pains to prevent it from just being humans being picked off. That does happen but by the time it starts we've got to know them. The term dirty space later coined to describe space-set cinema that blended the fantastic nature of the stories with mechanical realism was advanced here. I first noticed it when I went to see Star Wars in 1977 (now called A New Hope) and saw rusty space ships. The dirty space of Alien is sweaty, oil drips and steam flushes in the engine room. There's ugly ducting and fatigued keys on data entry consoles. The maintenance staff complain about shares and are only quietened when told that not responding to the distress call would result in forfeiture. These people actually work on this ship.

And what people. John Hurt (with an ashy cigarette possibly another first for sci-fi on screen), Ian Holm as the creepily emotionless Ash were stalwarts but Tom Skerrit, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto and Veronica Cartwright were on the rise from bits to leads. No one plays like it's Star Trek or Star Wars, if anything the performances are closer to the naturalism of a Ken Loach. But this is Sigourney Weaver's film. Her Ripley emotes intellect and, driven to action, hurls herself into rationally sound violence. She lets this break in the finale but at that stage we're with her panic and wide eyed at her quick thinking. For all its technical virtuosity, she made this film as it then made her. She not only had a great ignition but her career remains sound and busy.

Alien redefined the sci-fi movie as a horror setting, bringing it both closer (worker's privileges) and pushing it further out (the alien and its planet) in relation to its Earthly audiences. I was sufficiently struck by its believable weirdness that I had a nightmare: I was guarding a house that held a holy figure. The windows were black and I wasn't meant to look into them. I did, of course, and saw the one behind me was like the alien's mouth, opening on mouth after mouth of razor sharp teeth. The blackened valley around the house offered no escape.

There were sequels and some of them have merit. The prequels were disgraceful revisions by Scott who seemed to have done got religion in the meantime and were better left unmade. Scott himself in the shorter termed future, continued to make strong cinema but this was his breakthrough, the one that gave his name to the anticipation of his next, Blade Runner. It's tag line, "In space, no one can hear you scream," oddly enough resonates like the distant scream in the first few moments of the title sequence, never explained nor even identified, something that really did establish the horror of the endlessness of space. We're relieved to see the Nostromo glide into view and hear the crew talking like real people. But that, of course, is just the start.

Viewing notes: I watched my 4K disc for this blog. It's a sublime, deep transfer with a big dynamic audio track. I chose the 1979 cut for authenticity's sake and noticed no difference from memory (the director's cut is actually shorter but not by much). It's rentable from the usual outlets and available at Disney+ for subscribers. If you have 4K, just get the disc. You'll hang on to it.