Watched <The Zone of Interest> and Just Sat There Spaced Out for a While
It's not a film that pulls you along with its story — it's a film that presses down on you through sound and background. The noises coming from beyond the wall keep nagging at you the whole time.
After it ended, I couldn't say a word for about 30 minutes. It never shows you anything graphic, and that actually made it more unsettling. I remember thinking, sound design can be this terrifying.
I think people will definitely be split on this one. If you like story-driven films, it might feel boring. But for me, it was the first film in a long time that stuck with me.
7 answers
Fr, the sound was the real star.
I was also left staring blankly for a while after watching it. It felt like I couldn't explain what I had just seen.
The truly terrifying thing about this film is that it doesn't show any cruelty at all, yet it seats the audience comfortably inside the perpetrator's daily life. We're sitting in that house's garden drinking coffee, hearing the sounds from beyond the wall like 'background noise.' That was the most chilling part. The context also fits what the director said in an interview, to the effect that 'the goal was to make the audience ignore that noise.'
Well, isn't that a bit of an overinterpretation? The sound is impressive, sure, but using that to go on about 'making the audience complicit' feels like a rather clichéd routine. It was just a cold observational film, and I actually felt the message was too on-the-nose.