The Zone of Interest review
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writers: David Scarpa
Stars: Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller
Running Time: 105 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below.
When it comes to the holocaust, the appalling questions remain as disturbing as the answers. Jonathan Glazer’s disciplined The Zone of Interest (2023) is both a treatise on peripheral horror and an audacious act of demythologising. In the foreground, he adopts the slow living of upper-echelon Nazi life with it’s cups of tea and washing of long leather boots. In the background, the appalling questions raise their dreadful heads to turn domestic drama into appalling horror.
Sound is the most important component. To underline this, the audacity starts early with an extended black screen overture of Mica Levi’s discordant score, a droning, bleak collision of synths and distant voices that punctuates the forthcoming horror. The life of the Hoss family is idyllic and tranquil. They sit riverside in the long grass enjoying the sounds of birds and the high summer sun. Parents Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) lead their five children back to their picket-fenced dream home, one that could grace the suburbs of any European bourgeoisie neighbourhood. They have a pool, a greenhouse, and an extensive garden of blooming flowers that pierce colours into the frame between blue sky and grey wall. They also live next to Auschwitz concentration camp. Their domestic lives border a chillingly recognisable grouping of high walls and watchtowers. When Rudolf leaves for work, his walk from his front door to the camp is less than twenty feet.
As he leaves, we stay behind, remaining within the domesticated bliss of the Höss family home as the sounds of industrialised genocide float through its windows. Glazer’s premise is to keep us firmly tethered to the hideous domestication on display: their house is cleaned, their food is cooked, their dinners are eaten. In the meantime, the sound design deftly blends the ambience of nature and birdsong with the screams, gunshots and mechanical horror of the camp, often mixed so you can’t clearly tell one from the other. During a garden party, as guests mingle by the pool and drink copiously, we sight the smoke of a train crossing right to left, Rudolf Höss himself in centre frame in a spotless white suit. During a swim in a nearby river, Rudolf sees a change in the water and yells at his children to jump out. The river becomes stained with a new colour, one of waste being dumped from the camp. At home Rudolf washes furiously, the ash of his victims draining off him.
This peripheral horror is constant. Glazer’s brutal adherence to the rule of never showing you the horror clearly is in itself a type of torture, an act of showing us a biopic of a terrifying man, but without any explicit terror included. Occasionally we get glimpses into the mechanics. In one uncomfortable scene, Rudolf discusses the creation of a circular crematorium with his officers, but as with similar scenes, the business at hand is suitably dull to those involved. This is just how it is. This is their job.
This is also real history. Rudolf Höss was the longest serving commandant of Auschwitz. Film director Jonathan Glazer has deviated from the fictional Martin Amis book by refocusing the plot on a formalist true-story based on 2 years of extensive research. Part of Glazer’s research revealed the fact that Rudolf’s wife was furious about his promotion, which forced him to relocate back to Berlin. In the film, this is a key plot point in the domestic drama of their marriage – having finally gained her dream home, having perfected her flowers, having her idyllic life at hand, Hedwig is resolute to stay at Auschwitz at all costs. What’s so powerful about this device is, at a superficial level, it’s the story of so many marriages. All inherent normality is obscene when you live next to a concentration camp.
Both Rudolf and Hedwig’s determination to deny the scale of their atrocities, their steadfast ability to see their dehumanising point-of-view as acceptable, is the real horror on display. Glazer’s commitment to embracing this ‘normality’ in his usual formalism makes our (the audience’s) potential complicitness in this denial a possible outcome. This is why watching The Zone of Interest’s banal proceedings elicits real dread. The dread continues as Rudolf travels to Berlin where he decends into a dehumanised version of himself – as he attends a party celebrating Operation Höss, he sits a detached figure, cold and distant, voicing his throughts on the best way to gas the room. It’s a flourish of banal evil that builds into a single moment of shocking humanism in it’s final scene – his vision of the future, of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum cleaned by staff before it opens to visitors. It’s an audacious and heartbreaking moment that ties the ‘ordinariness’ of things to the unfathomably awful. A person vacuum cleaning in front of the display of shoes, another mopping the floor of a gas chamber.
It is, I suppose, Glazer’s way of letting us know some things defy banality. No matter how dully you try to capture the internals of industrial genocide, the inherent sadness remains unforgettable. As Höss continues to look into the future, the rest of us are still dealing with the present.
