A family like many others, happy in their house with a small swimming pool and a garden full of flowers.
Except that the house borders a wall, that of Auschwitz, and we are in the 1940s and a lot of smoke can be seen in the background.
Who could tell a family story within horror other than Jonathan Glazer, author of films like Sexy Beast, Birth and Under The Skin?
The British director signs the unmissable The Zone of Interest, from the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, making an adaptation which, after the applause at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix, three Bafta awards, many other awards including Critics' Film from the SNCCI, is preparing for Oscar night with five nominations (best film, best director Jonathan Glazer, best international film in challenge with Our Captain by Matteo Garrone, best non-original screenplay Jonathan Glazer and best sound Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn).
It comes out in theaters in Italy on February 22nd with I Wonder Pictures in collaboration with Unipol Biografilm Collection, produced by A24 and Extreme Emotions.
Filmed in German and Polish (Glazer's first not in English), the film follows the daily life of this family, made up of the commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and four children.
What happens?
Nothing extraordinary compared to a normal family, life goes on as if nothing had happened, mothers walk with their daughters, officers eat their rich meals in the canteen and the bureaucracy in the offices follows its course.
Of course, at the Höss house Rudolph often brings together his subordinates to study a new crematorium oven that is more effective than the previous ones, but no one would say that it is a wrong thing.
All around, however, another life, if it can be called life: hundreds and thousands of human beings buried in graves after being placed in the gas chambers.
A novel, that of Martin Amis (who passed away in May 2023), harsh, raw, rejected by a French and a German publisher for the disrespectful way in which it treated the Holocaust, an ironic, satirical vision in describing the persecution and extermination systematic of millions of Jews, with the focus on the house next door.
In this film, extraordinary for the enveloping way in which it leads us to understand what is really behind that wall, the soundtrack is even more extraordinary.
At the beginning it's just a dull noise that you don't even notice well, only later discovering that this noise continues imperceptibly throughout the film.
Only at the end, however, do you understand what it really is: it is the sound of the extermination machine at full speed.
"When we started shooting, about nine years ago, the area of interest was a totally different world panorama. And I must say that my feelings are quite complex today compared to what is happening also because the scenarios change quickly", he said at the Rome Film Festival on 23 October in an applauded masterclass.
Why do these horrors continue to repeat themselves?
"History is destined to repeat itself. This is why I talk about the holocaust, but I never show it except in the eyes of the mind. We need to stop the vicious circle, detach ourselves from the suffering to reflect. Even if the holocaust happened eighty years ago. years ago this shouldn't make us feel safe. This security is wrong because the important thing is to face the violence within us."
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