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Mobster is assigned to finish off a club owner after a previous attempt to set him up went wrong. They drive into an abandoned building, both very well aware of the situation and fatalistically going along with it. They get out of their cars. The mobster leans on the hood of the car, his face tortured with self-disgust. Out of desperation and anger, he starts going off: "That jerk Karl Marx said opium was the religion (deliberate misquote) of the peo... well, I got news for him, it's money, money, that's Jesus Christ. My father was right... You know what's wrong with the world, Cosmo, including me and everybody who might be in here? The whole world needs a father, all at the same time!

There's nothing wrong with you, Cosmo, money, money... My father was a nice guy, you should've met my father..."

You know what I mean? Who else but Cassavetes? One of a kind. If you get it, you get it. If you don't, I'm very sorry.

Great cinema like Tarkovsky's almost always bewilders people for all the wrong reasons - they think there's plenty of hidden clues and symbols that are hidden, and one must decipher them. So their viewing process is always intensely cerebral. In other words, people mistake visceral art with intellectual art. The key to Tarkovsky and visceral filmmakers alike is simple - turn your brain off, turn your soul on(by being patient and shutting off the intrusions of the mind). With this film in particular it's very important to catch that contemplative rhytm Tarkovsky conducts. If you can do that, if you can unlock that part of yourself that's been locked for so long, you will open up an entire world, an additional dimension to existence. And you will also understand why Nostalgia in particular and Tarkovsky in general deem all other films and filmmakers, with the exception of very few, insignificant.

The first impressions I got from The Zone Of Interest are very much equivalent to how I felt after seeing Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut for the first time. The feeling of coldness, detachment, alienation, a sense of the film being at the same time undercooked and too long, a certain confusion and dumbfoundedness due to an apparent insignificance of the picture. Years later, upon subsequent viewings, Eyes Wide Shut revealed itself to be a grandiose achievement, an-impossible-to-solve puzzle of a film that operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously; Kubrick's highest point, perhaps. Will Jonathan Glazer's latest turn out to be to be as revelatory? Time will tell, but as of now, I can't say I'm much impressed. One of the industry's most original artists, despite the heavy subject matter, came out with his most ascetic,restrained, but seemingly uninspired effort yet.

The key element of the film, the one that's supposed to cause all the dread and discomfort, becomes apparent, if not through the synopsis, all the promotional trailers and press reviews, within the first 10-15 minutes of the film - a Nazi German family enjoys a pleasant, carefree(relatively), bourgouis lifestyle at a house situated right beside Auschwitz. Women gossip in the kitchen, kids play on the lawn, men discuss business in the office while in the background the chimneys of the camp breathe out black smoke with the remnants of infinite dead souls, and the dark humming of luciferian machinery can be heard at all times as the family goes about their daily business at the house. This is established early on, and that's what the film dwells on for practically the entirety of its length, with bits of the Nazi family drama(to intensify the absurdity of the horror, perhaps?) and the occasional switches to strangely filmed scenes with a girl from Polish resistance that take us back to Glazer's own Under the Skin in terms of their visually alienating quality.

The film is not interested in moralizing, dramatazing and judging. Of course, with a subject matter like this, one thinks one can't afford to avoid moral evaluation, one has to say something, and so most reviews, professional or not, are filled with fancy expressions like "the banality of evil" and the neverending discussion on the essence of Naziism and the Holocaust. But look at the camera in the film. It's almost Ozu-like in its asceticism. It barely moves and avoids close-ups(if there are any, almost exclusively on inanimate objects). The camera is quite voyeuristic, though, at times seeming as if the Führer himself is watching from the other side, cold, disinterested, but a little paranoid - pure surveillance. Some other times it seems as if some poor guy escaped from the camp and is hiding at the house, trying to calculate the exact moment to escape further, afraid of twitching a single muscle; he has no time for judgement or any opinion on the residents of the house, it's not the time for it. The film presents itself in a straightforward manner, it understands that the right and the wrong in this historical event is today a matter argued only by a tiny few of radicals and other kinds of ethically challenged, and is otherwise, more or less, settled. The rest is up to you to evaluate.

Despite all of the film's strengths and subtleties, it somehow didn't land much, or at least didn't land as much as Glazer's other work. It doesn't stay with you the same way. It lacks the exuberance, the eccentricity, the adrenaline of Sexy Beast; the tenderness, the melancholy, the intimacy of the much overlooked Birth; the esotericism, the mystique, the otherworldly quality of Under The Skin. You see how easy it is to attribute right away a distinct set of qualities to all of Glazer's films prior to the Zone. The same would be hard to do with Jonathan's latest. It's intense, it's baffling, it's interesting, it's experimental, it's imaginative, it's Jonathan Glazer, but so are his other films.

We'll see what time does to The Zone of Interest. Will we discover something deeper there, something more visceral? Perhaps, in 2030 we'll be talking about it as one of the greatest films of the decade and century. But for now, I thank Jonathan Glazer for giving us another piece of stimulating cinema, and will now go rewatch Birth.