Producers: James Wilson and Ewa Puszczyńska   Director: Jonathan Glazer  Screenplay: Jonathan Glazer   Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Imogen Kogge, Johann Karthaus, Freya Kreutzkam, Lilli Falk, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier, Ralph Henforth, Rainer Haustein, Daniel Holzberg, Julia Polaczek, Sascha Maaz, Max Beck, Wolfgang Lampl, Medusa Knopf, Stephanie Petrowitz, Zuzanna Kobiela and Martyna Poznanski   Distributor: A24

Grade: B+

If you’re searching for a literally faithful film of Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, you’d best look elsewhere; in Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation the book’s narrative is basically jettisoned, replaced by an artful portrayal of what Hannah Arendt famously referred to as the banality of evil, a phrase that by now has itself become a rather banal commonplace.  Some will find the result a bit of a one-trick pony, but in its indirect depiction of the Holocaust, it carries substantial dramatic power, and its implicit accusation that the silent acceptance of evil means moral complicity with it certainly resounds in our contemporary world.

The time is 1943, and the setting the handsomely ordinary home that Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the SS Commandant of Auschwitz, occupies with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their bevy of children—Claus (Johann Karthaus), Heideraud (Lilli Falk), Inge-Brigit (Nele Ahrensmeier), Hans (Luis Noah Witte) and infant Annegret.  The house, along with the garden (complete with greenhouse) and spacious yard with a small swimming pool that Hedwig has carefully nurtured, is separated from the death-camp by a wall topped with barbed wire.  One can glimpse the roofs of the structures on the other side, and the guard towers and tall chimneys with black smoke billowing out of them; but it’s mostly the sounds of screams, threats and pistol shots (as well as the smell, one presumes), that intrude as background noise to the family’s bourgeois existence. 

But in the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy, of course, normalcy has certain perks.  The Höss house comes with servants like Marta (Martyna Poznanski), Aniela (Zuzanna Kobiela) and Sophie (Stephanie Petrowitz) recruited from the camp inmates and locals, who must docilely do whatever is commanded of them.  Hedwig and her friends have the pick of things taken from new arrivals at the camp—dresses, in one case a mink, and even items like lipstick.  (One woman remarks that she found jewels hidden in a tube of toothpaste.)  And young Claus cherishes the bag of gold teeth he’s collected while Hans plays with his toy soldiers.

The house also welcomes visitors—officers on the Commandant’s staff come to hear his orders, and sometimes technocrats who discuss plans for making the extermination process more efficient.  There’s also a personal visitor—Linna Hensel (Imogen Kogge), Hedwig’s mother, whom her daughter delights in showing around, proud of her landscaping efforts.  Linna seems impressed, but perhaps because of the stench her visit does not end happily for Hedwig.  Rudolf, meanwhile, takes the opportunity to engage in a bit of infidelity.

And occasionally despite the precautions the world beyond the protective wall breaks through in other ways.  When Rudolf takes the older children for an outing at a nearby stream, for example, he’s horrified when he finds some human remains in the water and rushes the children back home for a thorough bath.  He also scrubs his genitals after he’s had sex with a prisoner.  The obvious point is that however the family might try, it’s impossible to wash off the residue of Auschwitz entirely. 

The real crisis comes only when Rudolf is informed that he’s being promoted to an administrative position in Germany overseeing the operation of all the camps.  Hedwig is upset at the thought of leaving the homestead she’s cultivated so carefully, and pleads with him to ask his superiors to allow her and the children to remain living at “The Zone of Interest,” as the Nazis euphemistically referred to the camp area.  They agree to the peculiar arrangement, and so the new camp Commandant Arthur Liebehenschel (Sascha Maaz), with whom Höss is swapping jobs, will stay elsewhere.  Rudolf, meanwhile, reports by phone to his wife about his success in organizing new transports to the camps, especially of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews who have recently been added to the Final Solution, and accepts the congratulations of superiors like Generals Oswald Pohl (Ralph Henforth) and Richard Glücks (Rainer Haustein) for his stellar work, though officious camp inspector Gerhard Maurer (Daniel Holzberg) seems less impressed, more interested in securing a steady supply of slave labor than more piles of ash.

The focus moves away from the Höss family only on two occasions.  Inserts show a young Polish girl, Aleksandra Kołodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), engaging in dangerous nighttime missions to place food at work sites where prisoners can find it.  These sequences, shot in black-and-white with thermal cameras to give them a ghostly hue, are juxtaposed with scenes in which Rudolf reads excerpts from fairy tales like “Hansel & Gretel” to his young daughter at bedtime, accentuating the contrast between the good done by resistance workers with the Commandant’s casual separation of his official cruelty and his domestic affairs.  During one mission the girl is depicted finding the text of the song “Sunbeams” by Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf and, in later color footage, playing out the melody on her piano as the words are given in subtitle.  Wulf, a survivor, later wrote of his experience in the camp.

The other shift comes at the film’s very end.  Höss is shown leaving his office late one night and retching as he walks the deserted white hallways of the sterile building, apparently finally realizing the enormity of what he’s been doing before regaining his composure and departing.  This is immediately followed by a sequence in the present, following the maintenance staff at the Auschwitz museum vacuuming and sweeping the hallways and cleaning the exhibits of prisoner uniforms, discarded shoes and luggage—the remnants of his SS career.

One can’t help but be moved by those final images, even though like the entire film they have, in the cinematography of Łukasz Żal, the production design of Chris Oddy and the costumes of Małgorzata Karpiuk, an antiseptic, clinical feel that’s italicized by Paul Watts’s stately, formal editing.  The naturalistic nonchalance embodied in the performances of Friedel and Hüller—he the spit-and-polish, ever-efficient officer and she the frumpy hausfrau whose bursts of emotion are limited to domestic disturbances—as well as the rest of the cast, including those playing their children and cowed servants, is certainly unsettling (the sole exception is Kogge, whose Linna is clearly distressed by the household she flees); but the real horror lies behind the walls that separate them from the camp, and this Glazer never shows, leaving us to intuit it from the rumblings of Mica Levi’s menacing, often dissonant score and, even more, Johnnie Burn’s sound design of muffled shouts and gunfire. It’s, of course, the contrast between the family’s contented, matter-of-fact mode of life and what we know is happening beyond the little bubble they’ve created for themselves that’s the point of “The Zone of Interest.” 

Through its concentration on the household the film invites us to confront the sad reality of how human beings can refuse to challenge, and even pretend not to notice, the injustice swirling around them.  It’s a laudable purpose, though one that you might argue Glazer presents in a fashion both repetitious and self-consciously artsy.       

Producers: Genki Kawamura, Kenji Yamada, Megumi Banse, Taichi Ito and Hijiri Taguchi   Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda   Screenplay: Yuji Sakamoto   Cast: Sakura Andō, Eita Nagayama, Sōya Kurokawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Yūko Tanaka, Akihiro Tsunoda, Mitsuki Takahata and Shidō Nakamura   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B+

Different perspectives merge in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Monster,” a film whose tripartite construction proves deceptive, leading one to expectations that are then upended. 

The first third of the film is told from the POV of Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō), a widow living with her adolescent son Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) in a coastal Japanese town.  It begins with an event that recurs later in the complex scenario by Yuji Sakamoto, the burning of a building some distance from the Mugino apartment.  It’s a place that houses a “hostess club,” where lonely men go for companionship, which could explain why someone might have torched it.

Mother and son watch the blaze from their patio.  It’s the conclusion of a day when Minato had gotten home late from school, without one of his shoes and with a new bruise.  The boy’s already been acting strangely, posing questions about his father’s possible reincarnation while they remember his birthday.  Now he’s asking whether a pig’s brain can be implanted in a boy.  And when Minato actually does something harmful to himself, Saori forces him to confess that he was struck by his homeroom teacher Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), who, he says, also belittled him.

Furious, Saori goes to the school to demand an explanation.  She’s met by a ritualistic apology from the principal, Mrs. Fushimi (Yūko Tanaka) and the other teachers, including, in the end, Hori.  But he also informs her that her son is a bully who’s been mistreating Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), his smaller classmate.

The perspective now shifts to Hori, who is rumored to have patronized that hostess club—and, indeed, is involved with Hirona (Mitsuki Takahata), who works there.  He is in fact concerned about how Yori is treated—he even has visited the boy’s father (Shidō Nakamura), but found the possibly abusive man frankly unresponsive, and his recollection of how Minato was struck is very different from what Saori has imagined.  But as news about his abuse of a student spreads, it threatens his job and leads Hirona to drop him.

As the perspective shifts to Minato, things take a very different slant.  It would be unfair to reveal what the boy has experienced; suffice it to say that how the adults have interpreted events is extremely dubious.  There’s a revelation about that recurrent fire, and also a scene that forces us to reassess our view of Principal Fushimi, whom Saori had seen tripping a rambunctious kid in the supermarket.  She had only just returned to work after taking a break to grieve for her grandson, recently killed in a car accident; but there are rumors that the person responsible for the boy’s may have been misidentified.  Now we see her reaching out a helping hand to Minato when the boy was at his lowest.

That scene between them can be dismissed as mawkish, and the entire final act of the film, which involves a typhoon, a mudslide, an unlikely collaboration between people who have been hostile to each other, and a bucolic sprint through the sunlight, will be deemed as alternately melodramatic and saccharine by some viewers.  But it’s all part of Kore-eda’s plan to lead us to an appreciation of the complexities of the human condition, the misunderstandings that blind people in their attitudes toward others and, finally, the perils and pains of childhood.  The result is a deeply humane film that, if one has the patience to unpack it, proves both touching and strangely uplifting, despite all the trouble and turmoil it portrays.  It invites us to identify which of the characters the title refers to while making an easy answer impossible.

“Monster” is artfully constructed by Kore-eda, who not only directed but edited, and marked by expert work from production designer Keiko Mitsumatsu (especially notable in the fantasy-touched railroad car sequences toward the close) and cinematographer Ryuto Kondo; the plaintive score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, his last, adds to the moving atmosphere.

Kore-eda also secures telling performances from his cast.  Those of the adults are excellent, but his work with the children is especially remarkable.  Both Kurokawa and Hiiragi are extraordinary, and the others who make up their classmates are raucously realistic as well.  That’s a skill Kore-eda already demonstrated in his remarkable “Shoplifters,” and it’s evident here as well.

“Monster” is a film of fascinating complexity and compelling artistry.