November 2026

The film opens not on a face or a landscape but on a held black frame with sound: birdsong, then something below it that isn't quite right — a low, sustained industrial undertone you'd almost convince yourself was tinnitus, if the birds didn't keep insisting everything was fine.

The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, 2023. I saw it last year and returned to it tonight at the Nova on Lygon Street, partly because I'd been thinking about Johnnie Burn's sound design and wanting to test it again through proper speakers rather than headphones. It held up. More than held up.

Glazer isn't making a film about atrocity. He's made a film about adjacency — about the domestic life of Rudolf Höss and his family in a house pressed against the outer wall of Auschwitz. The camera rarely moves. It watches rooms the way a security feed watches rooms: without commentary, without cut-away relief. What the film refuses to show is precisely the point, and the sound fills the negative space with something the eye would have flinched from anyway.

What it isn't trying to do is recreate or represent. It doesn't want your tears at a particular moment. That restraint is a formal decision, and I read it as the right one — even if the effect can tip, in the film's quieter domestic passages, toward an almost sterile remove. There were moments tonight where I felt the thesis sitting heavier than the experience.

Sandra Hüller's performance holds the household together without ever stepping outside its own self-satisfaction. She tends the garden. She reads aloud in the evenings. The ambition she brings to the role is in what she withholds — no flicker, no doubt, no exit.

Walked home in the rain afterwards, and that undertone was still somewhere in my ears.

#film #sounddesign #cinema #watchingnotes