The key sequence in the procedural courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall is indicative of director Justine Triet’s masterful storytelling for what it doesn’t show us. The man who suffers the fatal titular fall, Samuel, made a surreptitious audio recording of a vicious argument between he and his wife, Sandra, that ultimately turns physically violent.
As the jury hears this altercation, Triet allows us to see what they can’t. She stages the heated exchange as a flashback, but only the portion where words are used as weapons. Before the first slap is doled out, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. We experience the physical violence between Samuel and Sandra as the jury does, who can only hear the wordless scuffle with no way of knowing who is doing what to whom.
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“I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
These words are spoken in The Zone of Interest – director Jonathan Glazer’s utterly transfixing and horrifying film about the Holocaust – over a breakfast table as the woman who utters them eats her morning eggs.
If you didn’t know the actual words used and were asked to guess at what was being said using her tone, the surroundings, and the action, you might say that this woman was reminding the young lady serving the meal that the salt and pepper shakers need to be brought to the table, or that the coffee isn’t quite up to par this morning. She seems a little put out, but delivers the very real threat of murder like she’s annoyed that the napkins are folded incorrectly.
Here lies the sickening magic at the heart of Glazer’s nauseatingly potent picture. We don’t witness a single act of violence over the course of The Zone of Interest’s 104 minutes, yet it succeeds as a deeply disturbing portrait of what political theorist, historian, and philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.”
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