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.