Jonathan Glazer’s film about the Auschwitz commandant and his family stays in their house and garden and never enters the camp. What it does with sound instead is the most frightening thing we have seen in years, and we would tell a stranger to see it.
Jonathan Glazer’s film is set in a comfortable house with a large garden. The man who owns it is Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and the far wall of the garden is the wall of the camp. Glazer, who wrote the script as well as directing it, has taken Martin Amis’s novel and kept the title and little else. What remains is a summer of family routine, filmed as if the family were unremarkable, and it frightened us more than any film about the Holocaust we can remember. We would tell a stranger to see it. It runs 105 minutes, carries a 12A certificate, and shows no violence at all.
Christian Friedel plays Höss as a man who likes things done properly. He reads to the children, checks the doors at night, and listens to two engineers pitch a more efficient crematorium with the polite nods of a man buying a boiler. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig is worse, because she is happier. She has the garden, the greenhouse, the Polish servants and a fur coat that has arrived from somewhere, and Hüller gives her the settled contentment of a woman who has got what she wanted. The five children swim, squabble and are sent to bed, and Glazer films them as children, which is harder to watch than if he had made them sinister.
Łukasz Żal keeps the camera still and a long way back. Scenes are shot wide, in flat daylight, from about the height of someone standing in the doorway, and nobody is given a close-up. It looks like security footage of a happy home. Chris Oddy’s production design gives the villa cream walls and tiled floors, and a garden thick with flowers, with a whitewashed wall, a run of wire and a chimney beyond it, in shot for most of the film and mentioned by nobody. Małgorzata Karpiuk dresses the family in white cotton and floral prints, so they look like an advertisement for the countryside. Paul Watts cuts each scene short, usually before anyone in it has had time to react.
Then there is the sound, and that is what got us. About ten minutes in we realised the low rumble under the birdsong had been there since the first scene, and that the shout we had just half heard was not one of the children in the pool. After that we could not stop listening: a single shot, a dog, a train arriving at night, an orange light moving across a bedroom ceiling. Nobody in the house turns their head. Mica Levi’s music is used sparingly, a long churning drone over a black screen before the first image and a few short passages after, and the music credit is shared with Joseph Wulf. Everything else you hear is the camp.
We have two reservations. At night the film switches to thermal imaging to follow a Polish girl who cycles out to the work sites and leaves apples in the earth for the prisoners. She is white against a black world, and hers are the only scenes in which anyone is kind. They are the one place where Glazer tells us how to feel; the rest of the film has trusted us to manage. A few critics have asked whether a film this carefully composed is making something handsome out of the worst thing that happened, and there were moments, watching the light in Hedwig’s garden, when we asked it too. We think the coldness is the point. We understand anyone who thinks it is an excuse.
Glazer’s previous film, Under the Skin (2013), also had music by Levi, and also watched something inhuman move through ordinary streets while nobody looked twice. Here the inhuman thing has a wife, five children and a well-run kitchen, and the streets are its own. It is a smaller, stricter film than that one, and a better one.
Watch it with the sound up and nothing else running. At home, wait until the house is quiet, because a dishwasher in the next room would be enough to spoil it. The family on screen managed to ignore a good deal more.
