The basic premise of this film is fascinating, but the technique is infuriatingly slow and dull. Rather than concentrate on the characters and the story, we're given intermittent artsy shots of stylized night photography that seems to have little to do with anything, as well as scenes that are disjointed and run on endlessly with little direction. The actors are all very good, though there is little character exposition or explanation as to how and why they are there. The garden photography is straight out of a National Geographic episode, hammering too hard the juxtaposition of beauty and unseen horror. I'm not entirely certainly why the film won an Oscar for best sound simply by always playing muted sounds of horror from the concentration camp in the background---it wasn't exactly complex to do. And what were all of those endless blank shots for?? Somehow, the hidden horrors of a death camp were made very dull.
Review of The Zone of Interest
