Friday new releases: 23 February 2024

The Zone of Interest, Drive-Away Dolls, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba - To the Hashira Training are in cinemas and Orion and the Dark is on Netflix

While there is no deny­ing that The Zone of Interest is one of the best films of this (or any) year, it still presents us with some­thing of a conundrum.

Jonathan Glazer’s pic­ture (inspired by rather than based on a nov­el by Martin Amis) is about the com­mand­ant of Auschwitz and his fam­ily who live next door to the camp, throw­ing parties, sun­bathing, wor­ry­ing about his career.

The hor­ror of the holo­caust are present – in sounds par­tic­u­larly – but they occur either out­side the frame or in dis­tance, on the oth­er side of the garden wall.

We know what those hor­rors are – because we are stu­dents of his­tory – and we can’t remain unmoved, des­pite the sub­tlety of the presentation.

And the Höss’s know, too, but they don’t care. Or rather, some­thing even worse. They do care, but they care about dif­fer­ent things than we do. He cares about the effi­ciency of his oper­a­tion. She cares about her garden and her new fin­an­cial status.

If you are famil­i­ar with the his­tory, every scene will res­on­ate with some unspeak­able detail. For example, sev­er­al times we see and hear the indus­tri­al­ists who are being made fab­ulously wealthy thanks to the forced labour in the camps or the invest­ment by the state in their technology.

But what if you haven’t had access to the truth about that peri­od before, or you have been sur­roun­ded by those who would min­im­ise it or deny it? Does the film encour­age you to ask ques­tions or do you sit there, bored at all this domest­icity, won­der­ing what all the fuss is about?

It’s in the final stages of the film that the big ideas – rather than the con­cep­tu­al­ity of it – start to land. Where we are asked to think a little bit more about these people and who they are – who they rep­res­ent, what they mean – and Glazer’s film­mak­ing bravura becomes irresistible.

The sound­scape is extremely import­ant which means that a distraction-free cinema exper­i­ence is, argu­ably, essen­tial to the appre­ci­ation of this film.

The Zone of Interest deserves mul­tiple view­ings (and mul­tiple inter­pret­a­tions), but it will be a little while before I’m ready to put myself through it again.

On a con­sid­er­ably light­er note, we get to cel­eb­rate the return of the Coens. Because, even though Drive-Away Dolls only fea­tures one of the broth­ers, Ethan as co-writer (with his wife Trisha Cooke) and dir­ect­or, it feels like a fully-fledged Coen Brothers film, sprung from the DNA of movies like Burn After Reading and Blood Simple.

It’s also prob­ably the most sexu­ally cel­eb­rat­ory movie seen in main­stream cinemas in a long time.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The film starts with one of the most hil­ari­ous murders I’ve ever seen and then just starts run­ning, rarely stop­ping in a refresh­ingly under-90 minute run­ning time.

We are in 1999 and Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is a free-spirited young les­bi­an woman in a tem­pes­tu­ous rela­tion­ship with a cop named Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). When she is finally kicked out of their shared apart­ment, she per­suades her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) to take her along on a road trip to Tallahassee.

Neither of them real­ise that the rent­al car they pick up was meant for someone else – it looks like it could be the Philadelphia mob – and on the way they dis­cov­er that the trunk con­tains some hil­ari­ous rub­ber con­tra­band and a severed head.

Chased across the south by clas­sic Coen-style dim­wit­ted hood­lums, Jamie tries to make out with as many women as pos­sible and Marian tries to fin­ish her Henry James novel.

I haven’t had as much fun as this at 11 o’clock in the morn­ing in a long time!

Screenwriter and dir­ect­or Charlie Kaufman is some­thing of a con­tem­por­ary of the Coens but his new film as writer is con­sid­er­ably more family-friendly than Drive-Away Dolls.

Orion and the Dark is an anim­ated crowd-pleaser on Netflix, about a middle-schooler with major anxi­ety issues who con­quers his fear of the dark with the help of … well, the Dark himself.

Based on a children’s book by Emma Yarlett, for the first few scenes it feels like we are watch­ing an epis­ode of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, includ­ing witty hand-drawn inter­ludes, but it even­tu­ally finds its own two feet as we are intro­duced to all of Dark’s noc­turn­al work­mates: Sleep, Quiet, Insomnia, Unexplained Noises and, of course, Sweet Dreams.

Finally this week, I ven­tured into the world of seri­al animé with the new fea­ture film in the Demon Slayer series. As a fan of the high end stuff – Ghibly, Shinkai, etc. – you would think I might have got­ten to these earli­er but here we are.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (or Blade of Demon Destruction) has been going since 2016 (in print) and 2019 (as TV animé).

It’s the story of Tanjiro, a humble peas­ant boy who returns home from selling char­coal in the vil­lage to find that (almost) every­one in his fam­ily has been slaughtered by a demon. Tanjiro is trained by the mys­ter­i­ous Demon Slayer Corps so that he can take his revenge and hold back the seem­ingly end­less tide of demons infest­ing early 20^th cen­tury Japan.

The latest film, To the Hashira Training, is really a big cinema ad for the next (fourth) TV sea­son, using a couple of epis­odes from the last sea­son and the first of the new one as a foundation.

It pretty much all went over my head but I’ll observe that, because it is about demons, it is quite viol­ent and that there is also rather more young female cleav­age than I was expecting.

There was anoth­er film released this week, Euro-horror Baghead, but when I looked for ses­sions that I could fit in I saw that it’s only rated 11% on Rotten Tomatoes (not that we should pay any atten­tion to them).

Anyway, I didn’t work too hard to find a ses­sion and chose to try Demon Slayer on for size instead.