In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer situates the viewer at the centre of frighteningly familiar banality. It’s summer in the mid-1940s, and a German family merrily idles by a river. Father Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and mother Hedwig (Sandra Hüller fresh from her multi-nominated performance in Anatomy of a Fall) tuck their kids in bed at night. They entertain family and guests in their vast backyard garden on the weekends. In the mornings, she oversees chores with a cadre of housekeepers and cooks; he goes to work as head Commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Their domestic life is paradisiacal. Yet over the wall abutting their home, we can see smokestacks, and at night we hear screams and occasional gunshots. Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity, filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi.
Screening as the centre-piece for our retrospective of British filmmaker's, Jonathan Glazer, work this month when we are also screening his other films - Sexy Beast starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, Birth with Nicola Kidman and Lauren Bacall, and Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson.
BAFTA AND OSCAR NOMINATIONS
BAFTA: 9 nominations including Best British Film, Best Film not in the English Language, Best Supporting Actress, Editing, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Sound, Production Design, Cinematography
OSCARS: 5 nominations including Best Film, International Feature, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Sound
