As I get out of the screen I keep the door for an elderly lady so hunched that she doesn’t reach my hips. A tall gentleman in his nineties whom I assume to be her son, or perhaps her grandson, holds her hand. As they pass in front of me, she looks up, gives me a tender smile, and with an accent I can’t quite place, says thank you. While I slowly follow them down the corridor towards the exit, I hear them conversing—she is Polish. My heart sinks to an even deeper level than the film has taken it, and it continues to fall as I write this note on my way home. And if the chilly wind outside has got my eyes wet with shy tears, is not quite for any of the obvious reasons, but for the beauty that art and life just made experience.
By the way, the only thing that doesn’t work in Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited The Zone of Interest is the green glow of the emergency exit. Everything else is a marvel—exclamation mark.

Among the many short films recently made by well-known directors (Mati Diop, Pablo Larraín, Paolo Sorrentino, Sebastián Lelio, to name some of the directors behind those I have seen) there is one that succeeded where others struggled to penetrate the creative muffling of this static unprecedented time.
Referring in the title to a strange epidemic case of compulsive urge to dance in the streets, Strasbourg 1518 implies an analogy between the extravagant historical episode and the current claustrophobic condition. With the domestic means that this period demands, Jonathan Glazer and Mica Levi meet again giving birth to a work that gradually convinces by making of the collective hysteria a hypnotic spectacle. The delirium and addiction of life in a cage according to the rare genius of one who managed to resist the torpor and keep feeding the artistic unquietness.

In the dark night of a yellow forest, a masked gang makes its prey fall from a tree. The possessed members take a grim group photograph to celebrate the success of the hunt as if they captured a beast—but it’s a man. The prisoner, also masked, is then thrown into a well with a noose around his neck. The furious running of the rope describes with a mournful hiss the interminable descent until its end disappears into silence. But the man is alive.
Clinging to the rocky walls of the humid hole, he frees himself from the constraints, not from the mask, and with ancestral free solo dexterity begins the long, difficult ascent.
Aired on the BBC unannounced and without credits, The Fall are seven gloomy minutes that grow with each viewing evoking sinister forebodings about our world, about everything we have seen or heard in recent years, and about the kind of human being we have become—the notion of which might still escape us.
Anthony Minghella once said that a short film should be a perfect sentence. The Fall is Jonathan Glazer’s response to that note.