The Actual Best Movie Sound Of 2024 Won The Oscar (Not The Loudest)
It isn't always true that a cacophonous work of cinema takes home the Academy Award for Best Sound (or what used to be "Oscars" before Design and Mixing were combined into one category), but I can't think of the last time a genuinely quiet movie won this award.
Then again, Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest" might've been, in terms of subject matter, the loudest movie of 2023. It shouldn't have been. 80 years after Allied forces began liberating Axis-operated concentration camps at the end of World War II, we should be crystal clear on the topic of genocide. We should've been clear on it then. But rather than learn from history, we remain determined to repeat its most despicable mistakes.
And as "The Zone of Interest" makes abundantly clear throughout its harrowingly placid 104-minute runtime, these really aren't mistakes. The monsters who executed the Third Reich's Final Solution were mostly middle-management milquetoasts who bought into a myth of genetic superiority and sought advancement by exterminating as many Jewish people as possible.
Christian Friedel's happily married Rudolf Höss is a man unpricked by conscience. He takes his kids swimming and horse riding, and, visually, it's all very lovely. He's a good father. He's also the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, which is right next door to his meticulously maintained estate. We don't see much of Auschwitz or its internees in "The Zone of Interest," but we do hear murmurs of their liquidation in the near distance. We hear a lot of things. All of it is unsettling, and none of it is in the foreground. And that is why Glazer's film deserved to win this Oscar over the (masterfully applied) sonic fury of "Oppenheimer."
The quietude of state-sponsored mass murder
Aside from the gloriously profane bluster of his debut feature "Sexy Beast," Glazer has specialized in aesthetically haunting films. "Birth" is a profoundly unsettling film about grief and letting go. "Under the Skin" is "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" meets "I Spit on Your Grave" on a fistful of benzos.
"The Zone of Interest" is about compartmentalized wickedness. It immerses us in the walled-off life of an unexceptional upper-class family that copes with everyday concerns of material happiness while, less than a few hundred feet away, Jewish people are gassed and gunned down by the bushel. Throughout the film, we hear the pitter-patter of machine-gun fire, the dull rage of furnaces, and the clatter of trains dropping off more fuel for the specially designed human ovens. For us, it is an oppressive horror. For Höss' and his family, it's little more than crickets on a humid summer evening.
I haven't been able to drive these sounds from my head since I saw "The Zone of Interest" in a theater — which is where you must experience this movie if it's still screening in your area. Watching this film is an act of bearing witness. It is to remember that the atrocities we treat as background noise — whether they're committed on the border of the United States, the streets of Gaza, the warzone that is Ukraine, and so on — are innocent people's ear-splitting hell.