Why Jonathan Glazer’s Films Feel So Unsettling

The films of Jonathan Glazer are full of uninvited guests, secret tunnels and shadowy pools. Portals to the unknown, from which all kinds of trouble might emerge, beckon around every corner of the British director’s four features to date. Often preferring to shoot from hip-level or in high, wide-angle shots that resemble surveillance cameras, Glazer’s films are at times aggressively voyeuristic, transforming the viewer into the alien presence that stalks his protagonists. His eye is clinical in both senses of the word: by turns coldly omniscient and urgently probing. 

If this uniquely unsettling focus has become Glazer’s visual trademark, it’s one he arrived at organically. Born in London, he studied theatre design in Nottingham before moving into commercial and music video work, landing in the thick of the ’90s British Rock revival. An early example of his clinical gaze appears in the video he directed for “Karma Police,” the 1997 Radiohead classic, which may still be his most widely viewed work to date. In it, a camera mounted on a 360-degree swivel inside what appears to be a driverless car slowly chases a man down a deserted country road. 

While widespread recognition of Glazer’s work as a feature filmmaker is only the result of his most recent release, The Zone of Interest (2023) – a muted portrait of Auschwitz from the perspective of the concentration camp’s caretakers – a look back at his filmography reveals his career-long obsession with human darkness in all its forms. Taken together, his movies are as much about our fragile grip on goodness (and the good life) as they are about the machinations of evil.

Sexy Beast (2000)

Glazer’s first feature hides the tropes of his mature work – isolated characters, dreamlike passages, long periods of silence – within the unexpected genre frame of a mob movie. Having first met the Scottish actor and screenwriter Louis Mellis while directing a series of successful commercials for Guinness around the turn of the millennium, the two got together with co-writer David Scinto to make a gangster flick. What began as a Scorsese-like epic of loyalty and betrayal eventually boiled down to a story about the Faustian bargain of crime itself, and the impossibility of walking away with clean hands.

Ray Winstone stars as Gal, a one-time lackey for a British gang attempting retirement in southern Spain. He’s scarcely been onscreen for five minutes, suntanning in a Speedo, when a giant boulder rolls down the hill above his villa and crashes in his pool, cracking its tiled basin. It’s the first of several bad omens to punish Gal for believing that a career criminal can simply give up his old ways. Soon, his psychotically craven old capo (a career-best Ben Kingsly) comes knocking, determined to lure Gal back for one last job. 

Even as the script self-consciously plays with classic mob movie tropes, Glazer’s focus is elsewhere: set on the almost mournful anguish of two men unable to live outside their habits. He brings a surprising level of somber meditation in an otherwise sun-splashed film. When the job finally comes, it takes the form of a bank heist accessed by drilling into the bottom of a London pool – recalling the body of water Gal had gotten so close to enjoying in the film’s first shot.

Birth (2004)

Trading in the filthy argot of inner London and the sun of southern Spain for the blue-blooded environs of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Glazer’s follow-up to Sexy Beast contains some of his most hypnotic filmmaking. At first, the film follows – quite literally, in a wraithlike overhead shot – a scientist named Sean, who goes for a run in Central Park and collapses under a footbridge. Ten years later, as his widow Anna (Nicole Kidman) prepares to remarry, a 10-year-old boy named Sean (Cameron Bright) shows up at their townhouse, claiming to be the reincarnation of the dead man. At first Anna – along with her fiancé, mother, and sister-in-law – laugh it off as a cute and misguided gesture. But the boy seems to know things that only the dead Sean could know. 

Birth is my favorite of Glazer’s four films to date. It may also be his least successful. The story immediately zeroes in on the erotic implications of Sean’s unbelievable rebirth, leading to a series of exceedingly uncomfortable exchanges between Kidman and Bright’s characters that reportedly drew boos at its Venice premiere in 2004. The script also quashes its mystery too quickly, as if fearing its own potential, with a supposedly open-and-shut ending that still leaves questions unanswered. 

But as the riddle of Birth unfolds, the film is entirely unforgettable, and each new development feels both unexpected and true. It helps that Kidman retains the aura of erotic frustration she gave to her best roles in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and To Die For (1995). 

Under the Skin (2013)

Recognizing that he was onto something in the controversial direction of Birth, Glazer spent the next decade whittling down Michael Faber’s 200 science fiction novel Under the Skin. Glazer turned the author’s sly critique of factory farming to something radically weirder: an adventure in humanity from an alien perspective. 

Viewers without prior knowledge of Faber’s novel will only understand that the character played by Scarlett Johannsson is simply wearing her body as a disguise, mostly for the purpose of picking up men. Those she successfully seduces soon disappear into a black abyss. A mysterious motorcyclist (Jeremy McWilliams) follows behind, removing any remaining trace of them.

As a foray into the uncanny, Under the Skin is practically peerless – sleeker and more self-contained than anything by David Lynch or Cronenberg. It’s so inhuman that you may wonder if it was even intended for us. But even after removing any trace of trope or concession to genre, Glazer still has a story to tell, and Johannson’s character does go through a minute, extremely unsentimental lesson in what it means to be human. As with all of Glazer’s films, this lesson is rife with just as much bad faith as good will. The moments of empathy are touching, but flicker like candles in an inky void.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Glazer’s latest film is also his most accomplished, bringing his work to a point where anything feels possible. For the first time, the “unwelcome guests” in his film are not intruders but captives: the thousands of unseen (but not unheard) prisoners of the concentration camp that Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), stubbornly try to pretend aren’t there, as they build a hideous simulacrum of a happy family just on the other side of Auschwitz’s wall.

Hate is a poison, and Glazer is fascinated by the ways it trickles down. His attention to the backyard games the Höss children play or the way Hedwig treats her servants makes them as important as any portentous glimpse into the actual heart of darkness next door. That such unthinkable suffering is largely abstracted and deflected by the main characters will surely mean it’s not prescriptive enough for some viewers. But Glazer’s method is rigorous, and his film is a bone-chilling testament to the banality of evil. As the director himself pointed out in his Oscar acceptance speech, it’s a condition we can continue to observe and learn from in our own time.