The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jonathan Glazer · a film in German, with passages in Polish and Yiddish · 2023 · 105 minutes · loosely after the novel by Martin Amis
Mode
Perpetrator drama held at a distance; domestic chronicle, document and fable in one
Mythos
The garden beside hell; Hansel and Gretel, its oven and its witch, read over a girl who leaves food in the dark; a descent down stairs into darkness
Phase
The household’s seasons in 1943 and 1944, from a picnic by a river to a transfer and a return for the deportation of Hungary’s Jews, with one cut to the camp as a museum now
Presentation
Feature film, 105 minutes, in German with passages in Polish and Yiddish; Łukasz Żal’s even photography from fixed positions, Johnnie Burn’s sound design, Mica Levi’s music at the edges only
Register
A flat, even daylight over a garden and a pool, with shots, cries, trains and furnaces under it at a low steady pitch; white heat by night
Scale
One household, its servants and its career, and the camp it lives beside, heard and never seen
Governing Proposition
The commandant of Auschwitz and his wife raise their children in a house whose garden runs up to the camp wall, and the film never goes over it: the image stays with the household, and the sound carries the camp under every meal. The wager of the film is that mass murder can be run as a career and lived as a home, that not seeing is a practice kept up by work, by taste and by the arrangement of a garden, and that a form which splits what is heard from what is shown can make its audience live in that gap and choose, as the family does, whether to listen.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins by refusing to be seen. After the title the screen stays black, and it stays black long enough for the audience to grow uneasy, while Mica Levi’s overture of voices and tones rises and falls in the dark. A film about what a household will not look at opens by making its audience listen before it lets them look. When the image comes it is a summer afternoon: a family picnicking and swimming by a river. The first thing seen is ordinary, and the first thing heard was not.
The man is Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, played by Christian Friedel, and the woman is his wife Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller. They live with their children in a villa whose garden runs up to the camp wall. Over that wall smoke rises, and from beyond it, under every scene of the day, come sounds: shots, shouts, dogs, trains, the furnaces. The camera never crosses. For the whole of the film the image keeps to the house and the garden, and the sound carries the camp. It is Rudolf’s birthday, and the family give him a canoe.
Jonathan Glazer wrote and directed the film, produced by James Wilson and Ewa Puszczyńska, and took from Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (2014) its title, its setting and little else. Łukasz Żal photographed it, Johnnie Burn designed its sound, Paul Watts cut it and Chris Oddy designed it; the music is Levi’s. It runs 105 minutes, in German with passages in Polish and Yiddish. It opened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023 and won the Grand Prix there, and was released in the United States that December and in Britain in February 2024.
Movement II
The days are routine, and the film gives them evenly. The garden is tended, the pool is swum in, the maids work, and the clothes that come up from the camp are shared out among the household. Among them is a fur coat, and in its pocket a lipstick. The plunder is not hidden in the house: it is the house’s furniture, its wardrobe, its small luxuries. No one says where the coat came from, because everyone knows.
The image is flat and evenly lit, seen from fixed positions in room after room, nearly without composition for effect. No face is entered for feeling, and no close-up asks the audience to feel with anyone. The house is watched rather than shown, as a surveillance camera would watch it, and the audience stands where the camera stands, outside the family and inside the house, able to hear everything and free, as the family is, not to listen.
Hedwig is the proprietor of this order. Hüller plays her proprietary, vain, coarse and fierce for her home, and she threatens a maid that her ashes will be spread on the fields. A firm’s engineers present to Rudolf a crematorium designed for continuous operation, and the pitch is a sales meeting like any other. The career has its business, the business has its products, and the household lives on both. Not seeing, in this house, is not ignorance: it is a practice, kept up by work and by taste.
Movement III
An outing on the river is cut short. Ash and bone come down the water, and the father sees what is in it. The children are hauled out, and at home they are scrubbed in the bath. The camp has entered the children’s bodies by the one way the wall cannot stop, and the family wash it off. It is the first time the film lets the father see.
Hedwig’s mother comes to stay. She admires the house and the garden, the life her daughter has made. At night she cannot sleep for the noise beyond the wall and the glow above it. She stands at the window, and the sky over the wall is orange. In the morning she is gone, and a note is left on the table. She is the one ordinary eye the film brings into the house, and the ordinary eye cannot stay.
Once in the film the screen goes red and holds over the flowers, under Levi’s music. It is the one moment the even daylight breaks. Then the garden returns as it was: the paradise of flowers, fruit, a pool and a greenhouse, set against a wall over which smoke rises. The film’s architecture is that garden, laid out beside hell, and the family live in it as if the wall were the edge of the world.
Movement IV
Some nights the image changes. Shot with a thermal camera, in white heat on black, a Polish girl moves through the dark and hides fruit for the prisoners at their work sites. She is the one figure in the film who acts in the darkness the household will not look into, and the negative image that shows her is the only way the film can see in the dark. A found song is played on a piano, its words given in subtitle.
Over these sequences Rudolf reads Hansel and Gretel, the tale of children lost in a forest, a witch, a house and an oven, and the reading falls over the girl who leaves food in the dark. The tale splits into the film’s two worlds: the house with its oven on one side of the wall, and on the other the child who brings food. The film lays the fairy tale over its footage, and lets the audience hear what the household does not.
Rudolf is transferred to Oranienburg. Hedwig refuses to leave the house: it is the life she wanted, and she will keep it. She stays with the children beside the wall while her husband goes. The house has become her career as the camp is his, and neither will give anything up for the other. The household holds without him.
Movement V
In 1944 Rudolf returns to direct the deportation and killing of Hungary’s Jews. From a Nazi party function he telephones Hedwig, and tells her that he could not attend to the party because he was working out how the room could be gassed. He says it as a man reports on his evening. The industry and the household meet on a telephone line, and nothing in either voice changes.
Rudolf goes down a stairwell in an office building and stops to retch. His body, which has betrayed nothing, betrays him here, and the film cuts to the present day: the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where cleaners vacuum the floors and wipe the glass of the cases full of shoes, and wipe down the gas chamber. What the wall hid is shown once, and as a museum, kept visible, daily, by its cleaners. Then the film returns to Rudolf going down the stairs into darkness, and the credits run over Levi’s long piece of massed voices.
At the Academy Awards of March 2024 the film won Best International Feature Film, for the United Kingdom, and Best Sound. It was argued over from its first showing and still is: whether its distance is ethical or evasive, whether the cut to the museum is its moral or its lapse into instruction, whether Hedwig is more culpable than her husband. Its director’s speech at the Academy Awards divided its audiences and became part of how the film is discussed. What it has made is a form: a house in the image, a camp in the sound, and an audience left in the gap between them, choosing whether to hear.
Act III · The Twelve
The method is repetition, so the subtractive test is run against it: one more afternoon in the garden is not padding if it adds a sound, an object or a decision, and most do. The fur coat brings the plunder into the house; the engineers bring industry; the river brings the camp into the children’s bodies; the mother’s visit tests the household against an ordinary eye, which cannot stay. The cut to the museum is required, the one place the film shows what the wall hid. What gives: a second tour of the garden does one job twice, and the red screen states a horror the sound had already carried.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: mass murder can be run as a career and lived as a home, and not seeing is a practice, kept up by work, taste and the arrangement of a garden, not an absence of knowledge. Everyone in the house knows: Hedwig shares out the clothes, threatens a maid that her ashes will be spread on the fields, and fights for the house. Much of this is disclosed through sound, and counts in full. Held near the gate by priority: Arendt on Eichmann (1963), Shoah (1985) and Amis’s novel had made the claim, and the film adds the mechanism of not seeing, real but narrower.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful and cold, and rationed by design: the daytime image is flat, evenly lit and nearly without composition for effect. The summits are of sound and of breaks in the image: the opening black, held until the audience is uneasy; the river, where the father sees what is in the water; the mother at the window, the sky orange above the wall; the girl moving in white light through a negative world, the one image of goodness and the most beautiful in the film; the museum with a vacuum running; the last descent. Height is great at several points. Long stretches hold dread at a low steady pitch, and frequency is the cost.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is partly built. Its load-bearing structure is the garden beside hell: Hedwig’s paradise of flowers, fruit, a pool and a greenhouse, set against a wall over which smoke rises. The garden is the film’s architecture, not an allusion. Rudolf reads Hansel and Gretel, with its oven and its witch, over the girl who leaves food in the dark, and the tale’s halves become the film’s two worlds; the end is a katabasis taken literally. Held a tenth below the gate by the particular: the family are kept as surfaces, so the archetype lives in an arrangement of spaces more than in persons, and the tale is laid over the footage as much as built into it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the Holocaust film in two modes: the dramatised camp, from the television Holocaust (1978) to Schindler’s List (1993), and the refusal of the image, Night and Fog (1956) and Shoah. The film takes a third course: it never enters the camp, dramatises the perpetrators’ home, gives the sound what the image refuses, and films a house as surveillance, without coverage or the close-up for feeling. The stake was real: a decade’s work, a German-language perpetrator film by a British director, and the charge, made widely, of turning atrocity into an exercise. Held at the bar by preparation: Son of Saul (2015) had already given the camp to sound.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is the split between image and sound: the image is the house, the sound is the camp, and the household lives in the gap the audience is made to hear. Show the camp and the knowledge is gone, replaced by a spectacle the subject has taught us to distrust. The fixed cameras enter no face and offer no feeling for identification, and the audience is placed as an observer who, like the family, can choose not to listen. The thermal image is a second form for a second world. Held from the top by the red screen and by moments where the form underlines itself.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidentiary, and three years deep, so the axis is forecast, and the forecast is strong. The film was argued over at once and still is: whether its distance is ethical or evasive; whether the cut to the museum is its moral or its one lapse into instruction; whether the thermal sequences are fact or fable; whether Hedwig is more culpable than Rudolf, and whether the film enjoys her; how its present tense should be read, a question sharpened by its director’s speech at the Academy Awards. The formal depth yields on return: more is heard each time. But evidence is preferred to promise, and three years have only suggested what it will keep yielding.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 2023, so force and reach are scored together, and reach is the weaker by necessity. The intrinsic force is high: the film makes the perpetrators’ domestic order the subject, the soundtrack the witness and surveillance the camera, and turns a problem argued for forty years, whether atrocity can be represented in fiction, into a form. But Son of Saul made the decisive move eight years before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in three years it shows as wide attention to sound design as authorship, and as a discussion of complicity in looking among critics and in schools. Whether later films take up the method is not yet known.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole, one digital version with nothing lost. Its presence over three years is wide for a German-language film, in cinemas and on streaming services, carried by the prize at Cannes and two Academy Awards, though wide presence earns little on its own. There is no charge on the fabric. The surface is less fixed to its moment than most new work: a plain look, a period of 1943 and 1944, and one reach into the present, to a museum that will go on being cleaned. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is elapsed time: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and three years demonstrate little.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Johnnie Burn’s sound is the film’s second camera: shots, cries, dogs, trains and furnaces laid under the daylight, always present and never foregrounded. Łukasz Żal’s even photography from fixed positions makes the house a document with no visible hand. Mica Levi’s music is kept to the edges and is the more terrible for it. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig, proprietary, vain, coarse and fierce for her home, makes not one appeal to the audience; Christian Friedel’s Höss is a functionary whose body betrays him only at the end. The costs: variety of performance and of image is given up by choice, and strain shows where the form underlines itself.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the girl with the fruit in white heat by night, and the museum’s cleaners in plain colour some eighty years later. One law governs both, the film’s whole law: what the wall hides, and who looks. The girl acts in the dark the household will not look into; the cleaners keep the hidden thing visible, behind glass, daily. The house, the river, the engineers and the telephone call obey the same law, across a range from domestic comedy through industry and fable to document. The strain is at the joints: the red screen belongs to none of the film’s worlds, and the cut to the present changes the law for a moment.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Several orders are held and joined through one image, the wall. The family: a marriage, children, the mother-in-law, the household as a project of status. Labour: the maids and gardeners, the prisoners heard and never seen, and a career of transfers and efficiency. Industry: a firm’s engineers selling a crematorium as a product. The state: the SS hierarchy and the deportation from Hungary. History: the genocide, and its memory in the museum. The natural order: the river, the garden, the dog, the horse, the seasons. The sacred is present only as a fairy tale and as absence. Consciousness is withheld by design, from perpetrators and victims alike, and the figure describes that choice.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, then The Made at 8.9, then The Inner Law at 8.7. A form whose knowledge is the split between what is shown and what is heard, so that the household lives in a gap the audience is made to hear; a making in which the sound is a second camera and two performances make no appeal; and one law, what the wall hides and who looks, from the girl in white heat to the cleaners at the glass.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable at 7.6: the film survives whole in one version, with a presence wide for a German-language film, but three years is a short demonstration of survival. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.9, where family, labour, industry, the state, history and the natural order are held through one wall while consciousness is withheld by design, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, a high force with a reach three years cannot yet show and a decisive move shared with an earlier film.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 five tenths short and The Imperishable at 7.6 nine tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 101.0, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Zone of Interest as released in 2023, 105 minutes, in its one version, from the black screen before the first image to the credits: written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, produced by James Wilson and Ewa Puszczyńska, photographed by Łukasz Żal, with sound design by Johnnie Burn, music by Mica Levi, editing by Paul Watts and production design by Chris Oddy. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original, in German with passages in Polish and Yiddish; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word in any language, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Martin Amis’s novel (2014) is not part of the work and is named as its distant source. Accounts of how the film was made are not the object; only what they produce on the screen is judged. Details that could not be verified, among them the production companies and distributors, the length of the opening black, where in the film the red screen falls, ash from the camp spread on the garden, the name given to the operation against Hungary’s Jews, the rebuilding of the house, the number and placing of hidden cameras, the lighting and the making of the sound, are not given.