#cinema

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.

The film opens on two people at a bar, a third beside them, and someone — we don't know who yet — watching from across the room, trying to read the dynamic. Celine Song holds the shot longer than comfort recommends, letting the viewer do the interpretive work before she tells us anything. Past Lives (2023) earns that patience across its whole length.

Shabier Kirchner's cinematography works in grey-blue New York interiors and pale Seoul afternoons. The palette doesn't dramatize; it observes at a middle distance. I watched this on a Sunday evening, second time through, blinds half-drawn and the light fading outside — which turned out to be the right conditions. The film rewards a certain quietness rather than cinematic largeness. It doesn't reach for grandeur and doesn't need to.

Song's structural device — three time periods, roughly twenty-four years compressed into two hours — is familiar enough from literary fiction. What she does with it is keep the ellipses visible. The jumps aren't smoothed; we feel the gap as duration. Greta Lee carries most of that weight across the decades with a stillness that reads as held breath rather than blankness. It sounds to me as if Song is more interested in how longing changes shape than in whether it ever resolves.