Highly original in its style, this film definitely won't suit everyone, but I found it engrossing and effective. Slow-paced voyeurism of family-life across the garden wall from Auschwitz, yet they go about their daily lives more or less unperturbed.
Insidiously disturbing.
Not just because this is a true account of a family then, but of what it says about humans in general, our capacity for depravity and callousness. The stories we tell ourselves to quiet our conscience and satisfy our egos, fears, desires. To override our humanity.
This film might take place during Nazi controlled Europe, but it reaches far beyond that time. It finds us here as a metaphor for the West and how we go about our lives with some level of awareness of the plight of the "Third World" and how their troubles benefit us. Like the characters in the film we can turn away or tune it out, dehumanize and rationalize. Worried about our children's welfare, but insensitive to the sick and starving.
The Höss Family may seem exceptional in their callousness, but how many times have we seen this before? Slavery, Jim Crow Laws, South Africa and so on. And now, the Israeli genocide of Gaza and other current horrific world tragedies. Are any of us fully immune to propaganda and societal messages that stereotype, demean and other?
Just as ethnicity doesn't determine your worth, it also doesn't determine you capability for wrong doing. Being human does. We are susceptible to cultural conditioning regardless of genetic make-up.
This film is a warning. We need a new story and that story begins with cultivating our innate compassion. For each time (and I heard someone say this in an interview, but can't recall who) we dehumanize others, we lose a bit of our own humanity.
