"The Zone of Interest" review — New dimensions of evil in Glazer's holocaust drama
“She called me the ‘Queen of Auschwitz.’”
It’s a gorgeous mid-summer’s day. The family has found themselves enjoying the hot afternoon on the banks of the river. They picnic in a clearing surrounded by willow trees. The girls scurry through the brush, the boys splash each other in the river. The mother comforts the newborn infant on the picnic blanket. The father looks on contentedly. He’s happy: maybe this is the first time he’s been truly happy in a long time. By the time they start the drive home, it’s already dark. The boys argue in the backseat about childish things. One insinuates the other was sitting on him, which his brother vehemently denies. The father dismisses them both, hoping for a quiet car ride back to their two-story country-side home. As the rest of the family goes to bed, the father doesn’t sleep. His mind races, occupied by the heaviness of his work and his responsibilities as a top commander in the army. The next morning, the family wakes early for the father’s birthday. They bring him outside to give him a birthday present: a newly-fashioned boat. In the distance, ignored by the family on the lawn, two faint gunshots ring out from their disquiet neighbours, a sound they are now all too accustomed to.
Just on the other side of the wall that runs alongside the family’s yard, one can make out the distinctive slanted roofs and demonic spires of Auschwitz, the centre of the Holocaust in the later years of the Second World War. So begins The Zone of Interest, the latest from English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, a harrowing late-war story about the brutality and inhumanity of evil. Based quite loosely on a novel of the same name by Martin Amis, the film’s title refers to the enigmatic and deliberately obfuscating code word used by the Nazis to refer to the area around Auschwitz. In German, “Interessengebiet,” which literally translates to “interest zone.” Nazi commander Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (played by Sandra Hüller), take centre stage here, two characters based upon real people. We take just little glimpses into their lives here, as the two are used to explore the horrors of the Nazi regime and the greater revelations it has into the human condition.
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| Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest. Photo via A24. |
Glazer skirts the ageless question of the ethics of dramatizing the holocaust (or any atrocity for that matter) by never putting the horrors of Auschwitz on camera. This makes the film’s proximity to the active genocide all the more horrific. The sound design here is quite intentional, perhaps being the most critical element in the film’s formal execution. The sounds of children playing in the yard are punctuated with screams from just over the wall, gunshots break up the most ordinary of conversations, and the sounds of construction can be faintly made out as the women of the family prepare dinner. The scenes of the Höss family and their friends playing carefree in their yard are shot with the dark, sinister buildings of the camp dominating the top third of the frame. In the night, the children stare out their windows to watch fire and pitch-black clouds bellow out of the smokestacks.
In discussing The Zone of Interest, many critics connect Hannah Arendt’s infamous phrase “the banality of evil,” the subtitle used for her book on Nazi commander Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. The most shocking thing about Eichmann, who was in charge of the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and death camps around Europe, is that he was a boring man. Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann makes him into an averagely intelligent, misguided man who was just “doing his job.” He was remorseless for his crimes, but never bitter towards his captors. He displayed open hatred in how he interacted with others, yet carried out plans for genocide without a second thought. The Israeli government hired several psychologists to profile Eichmann while he was in prison and none of them could find any trace of mental illness or personality disorder in his character.
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| A still from The Zone of Interest. Photo via A24. |
There’s a lot of merit to this parallel between the Eichmann trial and The Zone of Interest: Glazer lives in Arendt’s cold, unfeeling characterization of the Third Reich’s power structure. Evil takes on a new dimension in Glazer’s film. Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (a two-time Academy Awards nominee) employ a rather detached shooting style, preferring to frame the scenes in wide, eerie shots that constantly remind the viewer of the fundamental juxtaposition of the domestic drama and the horrors on the other side of the wall. Neither Höss nor his wife are portrayed as particularly remarkable people. And it’s not as if the performances are deliberately restrained or controlled, but rather Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller’s make the couple boring. Höss isn’t portrayed as a domineering, tyrannical villain, but rather a mundane but ambitious officer. He does horrific things with no more enthusiasm than an office worker trying to complete a project. He bares no similarities to the caricatured, cartoonish Nazi villains of Hollywood dramas, rather making himself into a mundane man. Hüller’s Hedwig — Hüller’s second great performance in the last year after her turn in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall —has a bit more of a bite to her than her husband has, but that anger is more petty than anything. She falls in love with the place of Auschwitz, but because it’s her family home, rather than her love of the evil inside the camp.
This mundanity is what makes the characters all the more frightening and cuts into the central warning of The Zone of Interest: evil lurks everywhere. As the viewer stares into the black, unflinching depths of the human soul, that very darkness begins to reach out. And it conveys this through its unwillingness to depict its central atrocity. There are always hints of evil lurking in the ordinary but are hardly ever played up. Höss discovering human remains in the river surrounding Auschwitz is depicted with a sense of surprise, but not particularly dramaticized. It makes the viewer question their own complacency in atrocities around the world, trying to identify the evil lurking in our own hearts. If a man as ordinary as Höss or Eichmann could participate in evil so profoundly vile, what’s to say you or I would never do such a thing? Does our comfortability with the lives we lead blind us to the atrocities our own nations are responsible for?
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| A still from The Zone of Interest. Photo via A24. |
However, The Zone of Interest is about more than just portraying a banal, reasonless evil. Glazer interjects moments of more stylistic flair, like his use of night-vision photography, jarring sound cues, and a particularly interesting flash-forward sequence towards the film’s end. There’s a layer of irony and humour, all very macabre, that Glazer uses quite effectively. To be clear: it’s not humour by way of jokes, where the audience laughs and their characters’ wit or misfortunes, but rather moments of precise irony from its contrasting elements. As other critics have noted, Höss ending a letter with the phrase “Heil Hitler, et cetera” and Hedwig’s protestation of leaving their delightful home in Auschwitz are, in a twisted way, funny because of their inherent incongruity with the situation at hand. It’s this sadistic line of satire that keeps The Zone of Interest from being just an overlong tone poem about the banality of evil.
Since the end of World War II, and even a little before, thinkers, writers, and artists have been wrestling with the bewildering, incomprehensible evil of the Nazis. Wartime propaganda made clowns of the Reich as Hitler and his officers were seen frequently bested by comic book superheroes and parodied by the likes of Charlie Chaplin in film. Documentaries like Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour behemoth Shoah avoid ever showing the tragedy incarnate meanwhile Steven Spielberg’s drama Schindler’s List argues that it is vital to see to understand. Glazer’s work is part of a long tradition of trying in vain to understand the Holocaust because if there’s one conclusion these many texts come to, it’s that the sheer scale and soullessness of the horrors of this genocide are fundamentally impossible to fully understand. The Zone of Interest’s decentralization of the horrors at hand, however, gives the film a remarkable new perspective on the genocide. It’s haunting and utterly shattering. And all you need to do is listen.
The Zone of Interest is now playing in theatres.
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