Notes on…

The Grey Zone(2001)

Dir. Directed by Tim Blake Nelson

There's something distinctly off about the whole "what would you do if you were in their situation?" question this film is posing in a way that I can't quite articulate. My dislike for it goes beyond the obvious observation that it is horribly solipsistic (and analogous to the US-centric casting, perhaps?), and that the facile way the question feels designed to 'engage' the audience as if we were bored 15-year-old kids in Ethics class... all whilst disingenuously posing as a Worthy and Serious question. Yes, there is an understandable curiosity — indeed, famously, a "fascination" — about the Third Reich and the Holocaust that is in no way an endorsement of it, but we need to do better than this pornography of miserabilism.

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Synopsis: The story of Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of assisting in the extermination of fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life.