British director Jonathan Glazer’s films are less genre-defining than they are completely transformative. Having started his career in advertising campaigns and music videos, the London-born auteur has only directed four full length features to date. Those he has made display boundless formal innovation and complex thematic nuance, each one absconding the tropes of their genre. Totally unnerving and inexplicably hypnotic, he is unparalleled in his ability to engross audiences in bleak and morally perverse worlds.
While his diverse body of work includes everything from cursing East End gangsters to cryptic alien abduction, Jonathan’s projects are united by their tendency to explore some form of isolation. Whether it’s social alienation through intense grief like in Birth or the sweaty and confined electronic “choreomania” in Strasbourg 1518, he is fascinated by those on the fringes of society being pushed to their psychological limits.
Loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name, Jonathan’s latest film, The Zone of Interest, explores alienation and depravity at the site of one of humanity’s greatest crimes: Auschwitz. A haunting and singular entry into Holocaust cinema, Jonathan does not attempt to recreate unspeakable atrocities for the camera. Instead, his subject is the idyllic domestic life of Nazi bureaucrats. Following the quotidian routines of Camp Commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), the film goes beyond illustrating fascism as banal. In Jonathan’s film, an ideology that is so vile and morally sickening is presented as sterile, practically corporate instead. Nazism isn’t just an institutional framework, it is a disease that pervades all facets of life.
With the film’s recent festival premieres in New York and London, ahead of its US release via A24 in December, there’s no better time to explore the filmmaker’s decorated body of work. Here’s where to start.
The entry point is… Sexy Beast (2000)
Jonathan’s surrealist cockney gangster flick is a meditation on intense passion, psychotic violence and the spectres of past lives. Opening in a sublime Hockney-esque swimming pool in a remote Spanish Hacienda, the audience is introduced to Gary ‘Gal’ Dove (Ray Winstone), sunbathing in his tight mustard man thong. The ex-criminal spends his retirement wasting away under the languid Iberian sun with his lover DeeDee (Amanda Redman), living the British fantasy of an endless Mediterranean summer. All is well until the sociopathic Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a ghost from Gal’s mafioso past, bursts into their luxurious Almeria villa to force him out of tranquil exile.
On the surface, it appears the film is capitalising on the early successes of late 90s British crime capers by the likes of Guy Ritchie. But the archetypal London gangster is merely an aesthetic surface which Jonathan subverts, instead creating characters far more emotionally complex and fragile. While the film is an early indicator of his bold visual style and narrative experimentation, it is perhaps his most conventional and accessible for those new to his work.
The under-appreciated gem is… Birth (2004)
Lambasted by critics during its Venice premiere in 2004, Birth is a sharp and polarising departure from the sunny close ups of the burly Ray Winstone in his bathing suit. A delicate paranormal drama, it follows a woman named Anna (Nicole Kidman) on a journey of unwrapping old wounds, reconciling the past and accepting the present. After losing her husband a decade prior, the audience finds the reserved Anna embedded into Manhattan high society, ready to marry her new fiancé Joseph (Danny Huston). Life in their opulent uptown apartment is disrupted by the entry of Sean (Cameron Bright), a ten year old who insists on the reincarnation of Anna’s dead husband. The boy, with his piercing yet jaded stare, throws Anna’s life into melancholic disarray, unearthing unresolved emotions and irrational desires.
Despite the film’s divisive premise, it showcased Jonathan’s full emotional range as a filmmaker. From the vibrant and vulgar world of Sexy Beast, full of over the top performances, the acclaimed director channels a more muted and haunting atmosphere in Birth. Nicole Kidman’s performance is also stripped down, devoid of the usual charisma and glamour that the actress brings on screen. Long and ominous shots, like Sean’s penetrating gaze, feel voyeuristic, as the audience witnesses a woman afflicted by loneliness and intense grieving.
The one everyone has seen… Under the Skin
A box office failure on its initial release, this avant-garde adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel of the same name has since become a modern sci-fi cult classic. Accurately described as “very freaky, very scary and very erotic” by critic Peter Bradshaw, this third entry into the Jonathan Glazer canon is one of the most cryptic and visually arresting films of the 21st century. An extraterrestrial being (Scarlett Johansson) takes the form of a dark haired English woman, driving around the grey streets of Glasgow. The entity, with its fake fur coat and soft London accent, lures young men into a warehouse, stripping naked while its victims sink into a viscous pit of black tar.
Composer Mica Levi constructs its jarring industrial soundscape, full of metallic crashes and vacuous humming. The hostile sonic environment enhances Scarlett’s performance as a being out of its depth and completely isolated in a foreign environment. Viewers are never given clear answers to the aliens origins or motives, but Jonathan nonetheless makes us feel a visceral human connection to an unexplainable character.
Necessary viewing is… The Fall (2019)
This six minute short tells the story of a macabre descent into a nightmarish world of fascistic violence. Opening on a nondescript forest landscape, a masked lynch mob surround their victim who is perched atop a tall tree. Like rabid beasts, they shake the tree and drag their fear stricken prey across the forest floor, forcing him to pose for an ominous picture before they deliver his punishment. Taking inspiration from the viral Trump brothers trophy hunting picture, where both Eric and Donald Jr. ecstatically pose with a leopard carcass in their arms, this haunting tableau is viscerally disturbing.
A thematic companion piece to The Zone of Interest, this gothic, Goya-inspired short is Jonathan’s first explicit cinematic exploration into the psychology of fascism — how in an age dominated by groupthink politics and mindless aggression, our most violent impulses are brought to the surface.
The deep cut is… Karmacoma (1994)
Starting his directorial career in the world of 90s pop videos, Jonathan established himself as a singular voice in a space dominated by mainstream conformity. In his debut collaboration with English trip hop collective Massive Attack for their song “Karmacoma”, the young director creates a stilted world of unsettling cinematic pastiches, referencing David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Massive Attack’s moody and brooding single, which also appears in Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, transforms into a psychedelic bone chilling melody.