In the Zone
All of Us Strangers and The Zone of Interest
Watching
All of Us Strangers (2023)
I was really feeling the absence of good movies about the gay male experience in 20231 and finally Andrew Haigh delivered at the 11th hour. Like many people (I assume) I have a love-hate relationship with Haigh. Weekend? Good! Looking? Honey…
I found myself liking this movie more the more I read glowing reviews of it.2 Premise: Adam (Andrew Scott) is a fortysomething writer who lives alone in an underpopulated London high-rise. I think the building is new; it has all the growing pains that new construction has, like constantly malfunctioning fire alarms. Coming back inside from one of those drills one night, Adam is confronted at his door by Harry (Paul Mescal), a bloke who lives a few floors down and who has seen Adam around. Harry makes a pass; Adam shuts the door in his face.
Adam is working on a screenplay, ostensibly about his childhood. For research, he takes public transit out to the area where he grew up. On his first trip out there, he meets a man out walking and follows him in what looks like a cruising encounter. Surprise! It’s actually his dad, only he’s somehow younger than Adam. Dad (Jamie Bell) invites Adam home, where mum (Claire Foy) is waiting, and also looking not a day over thirty five. Thus the film’s second premise: Adam’s parents died in a car crash when he was 12, and on his visits back home he sees them—ghosts?—frozen at the age they were when they passed away.
Adam bops back and forth between the high rise and the family home (apparently it’s Haigh’s actual childhood home), relenting to a romance with Harry here and catching up with his parents there. Esoterically I want to call this a movie about housing, and how the spaces queer men inhabit contribute powerfully to their loneliness, whether they’re living under the putatively nurturing roof of a nuclear family in the suburbs or shacked up in the calibrated-for-individualism apartments of the early 2000s (it’s not by design that Harry gets the chance to talk to Adam in the first place). I like this reading because it skirts around one of the major criticisms I’ve seen of the movie, namely that it’s horribly on the nose.
Which, fair! I didn’t feel any strong emotional stirrings when Adam had a coming-out conversation with his mum for that very reason, nor during any of Adam and Harry’s intimate exchanges (although there is a great taking-ketamine-at-the-club montage that gets the blood pumping). One of the things that made Haigh’s Weekend so groundbreaking was that it put on film as if for the first time conversations that gay men have been having forever. In the dozen years that have passed since then, there’s been much more and much more readily accessible queer media. I couldn’t shake the sense that All of Us Strangers was a movie made more for straight audiences, the kinds of people who ate up Fleabag and Normal People and wanted a crossover event with their lead actors.
Then the movie ends with a swerve: Adam discovers that Harry, like his dad and mum, is just a ghost too. (The strong implication is that Harry went home and drank himself to death the night that Adam initially rejected him.) Learning that the entire film has been limited to Adam’s interactions with unreal people changes how we view it. It made me, at least, wonder what’s going on in the world Adam isn’t out there living in, that he’s shunning for the comfort and control of words on a page.3 Given some of the details of the story it would be easy to write off Adam as an authorial stand-in, Haigh’s chance to fantasize about how he wishes relationships would have gone in his own life. But I don’t think that gives Haigh’s imagination enough credit. If the movie represents Adam’s visualization of his script in progress, Haigh is under no obligation to make Adam a good writer, let alone one the viewer is supposed to strictly equate with the director.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Jonathan Glazer has haters. I first learned this after I saw Under the Skin in London in 2014 and had my socks knocked off. Soon after it went global, critics I respect and trust started grousing about it, socks firmly on feet and in shoes. I can’t remember if anyone went so far as to call Glazer a pretentious hack, but that was the general tenor. Who doesn’t love an ad hominem every now and then; but how are the movies?
The Zone of Interest, adapted—loosely? strictly? unclear to me—from a novel by Martin Amis, is this season’s appointed Holocaust drama, Cannes-lauded and anticipating a bevy of Oscar nominations tomorrow morning. You probably already know the gist from hearsay if not from that dishy trailer: it’s a Holocaust movie where the thing itself is forever happening just offscreen. Instead all we see are the goings-on of a Nazi officer and his family as they lead a bland, middle-class life right next door to Auschwitz. What we hear tells a different story: distant yells, occasional gunfire, the sickening and near-constant groan of what we are left to presume is a furnace.
I can easily imagine a much worse version of The Zone of Interest than the one we get. The movie seems to know the tightrope it’s walking, between grotesque obviousness on one side and smug remove on the other. One scene in the family’s yard trails off into a sequence of flowers from their garden that culminates in a slow fade into a screen-filling bright red. Mica Levi’s gutteral electronic score revs up—one of the few moments it appears, apart from an introductory overture over a black screen and the closing credits4—but before even two seconds of formalist experimentation have elapsed, Glazer cuts back to business. If The Zone of Interest is a European art film, it’s one without quotation marks around the designation.
Aside from a few exterior dolly shots, the camera stays put wherever it’s placed and avoids close-ups of human faces. Somewhere I saw someone describe the effect as that of watching a reality TV show, which takes it a bit too far, I think, but is a useful comparison for wrapping your head around what’s going on. What else does a multi-camera setup showing various unchanging views of the same premises remind you of? The resolution is higher and the angles generally lower, but Glazer’s rig has a lot in common with closed-circuit security camera footage (I should also add that the compositions are frequently hideous). As a surveillance film, The Zone of Interest doesn’t hope to intervene but at best find something out about how evil operates in its own home.
One of the common criticisms of the film that I’ve seen from the haters is that it’s useless, kitsch even. (Another criticism, which would be a good rabbit hole to go down sometime, targets the film’s supposed ahistorical treatment of how antisemitism operated at the time.) And I think I agree with them this time, if for slightly different reasons than what they give. I didn’t feel like I learned anything new from The Zone of Interest, either about how evil walked and talked last century or how it does so now. The fixed perspectives in and around the house that Glazer picks aren’t revelatory of anything, and that may be the point. It will probably take me more than just a few days to decide if this is a great movie or a bad movie masquerading as one. What I do feel confident, if sheepish, in saying, is that it’s something I’ve never seen a movie be before: a monument to its own uselessness.
Passages and Maestro really not doing any favors for the bisexual men out there. Also yes I know Rustin is out there but my Netflix subscription has already lapsed.
Namely Mark Asch and David Conner’s takes.
This is what we gay writers would call a read.
I want to pause here to offer one piece of unqualified praise for the film, which is that Levi’s track for the closing credits is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever heard in a movie.