The Wes & Roy Anders(s)on-aping visuals (two S’s... SS... coincidence?) seem to encourage the viewer to lock into the simmering undercurrent of deeply perverse and pitch-black humor baked (by way of ovens, you see) into the inherent compartmentalized hypocrisy of the premise, and downright silly rhymes like Höss smoking in his backyard in front of the looming incinerator tower certainly work perfectly as both an evil, impish kind of funny and as meaningful provocation when viewed from that perspective, but Christ, this movie is so desperate to be taken seriously - every time I start to think I’m watching something genuinely clever and interesting, Mica Levi’s awful score burbles in (there’s barely any music in this movie, which means at some point they must have recognized that it shouldn’t have any... so why is it there?) or we get a “passage of lyrical beauty that evokes the haunting offscreen horror” or whatever people are saying about this that has me pretty sure I am in fact just watching a Radiohead music video director’s idea of Serious Arthouse Cinema. Sir, you do not earn the emotional weight you seem to think having the subtitles read us poetry carries, you have to work smarter (not harder cuz dear lord it’s working hard) to land a thing like that! By no means did I hate this, but as far as A24’s inexplicably diverse late 2023 slate of Akerman-adjacent (all the lightswitching in this!!!) auteur-driven Nazi atrocity movies, I think Occupied City fares far better as a serious, challenging exploration of casual mass cruelty. Cool that there are two, tho! Would be pretty embarrassing if this won Best Picture, but it should probably get Best Sound!

My first Glazer feature, having up until now only been familiar with his music video work. Been humming that familiar tune lately...

Auschwitz... made of...
evil of banality
Oh, now there is no sound
’cuz we all live in Dachau!

You know, it’s pretty crazy how they shot that - it’s not the floor that’s moving, it’s actually the gas chamber...!