‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: A Suffocating Study on the Banality of Evil
The Zone of Interest contains two masterfully calculated performances from Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who accompany Jonathan Glazer’s terrifying visual and aural nightmare.
The Zone of Interest’s release couldn’t have been more timely. In a society where atrocities are committed daily, and policymakers (and the privileged occidental world) turn a blind eye to them as if they didn’t exist, here’s a movie where its protagonists literally see and hear the most despicable and inhumane acts happening right next door, and voluntarily avoid mentioning it. Adapting from Martin Amis’ book of the same name, writer/director Jonathan Glazer coldly presents these moments through the point of view of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), an SS officer known for having contributed to the extermination of more than a million Jews during his time as commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
We begin the film through idyllic tableaux of Höss and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), spending a day at the lake in a quiet area, where they slowly return to their house. Glazer and sound designer Johnnie Burn envelop the environment with a peaceful aura, as the family is painted having a typical weekend at the lake, with only the pure sounds of nature accompanying them. Once they make their way back to their house, cinematographer Łukasz Żal deliberately blocks the frame as if it’s just a traditional family home, with a beautiful large garden and pool surrounding it.
We don’t hear anything else, because the dog consistently barks at the family while Höss’ youngest baby continuously cries. Slowly, Glazer reveals that Höss and his family are living right next to the gate of Auschwitz, where they hear, see, and smell acts of barbarity committed daily. Continuous gunshots, agonizing screams of inmates losing a friend or family member, the dark red fire burning innocent human beings enveloping their field of vision, the smell of human remains as they are burned, ashes falling down in the sky, while human bones are dumped (and found) in the river next to Höss’ house.
At the same time, we’re subjected to dinner-table conversations where Höss and other officers are discussing its plans to build more effective gas chambers and methods of extermination when the camp finishes its expansion into Auschwitz II-Birkenau, while Höss lauds the progress they’ve made in the systematic genocide of a population through phone conversations with his wife in the middle of the night, and the pride he is feeling when an operation that will transport and kill more than 700,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz is named after him.
It’s sick, yet they should pay no mind if it’s not happening to them. One of the most harrowing sequences occurs when Hedwig’s mother visits their Auschwitz home and describes how beautiful it is while feeling proud of the independent life her daughter is leading with her grandchildren. But she can’t get over the sounds she hears while sleeping, of hundreds of innocent souls dying, and the smell making her physically ill. She doesn’t say anything to Hedwig, and leaves never to return. She does leave a letter, but the audience never gets to see the contents of it. But from the look of Hedwig after reading it, we know what it says.
Glazer and Żal also shoot a few sequences through monochrome thermal-imaging cameras, giving the film an even more petrifying look and feel without even directly showing a violent act being committed. Its haunting score from Mica Levi (who has been nominated for a Golden Globe for their work on the film) and sound design are enough to make you feel the horror without ever seeing it. It’s also part of the reason why some will understandably not want to watch it. There have been many films depicting the Holocaust, each as difficult to watch as the last. But The Zone of Interest depicts these horrors in a much more distressing way than any filmmaker did. It’s perhaps even more disturbing than Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, which directly shows the result of these atrocities so that you’ll never be able to remove them from your memory.
Since Glazer’s entire approach is through its image and sound-making, you may even hear the sounds in your head long after the film has ended. It’s what happened to me, and the night of sleep has not particularly been very good. It’s been a while since a film has disturbed me so without Glazer even showing an act of violence. That’s how powerful this thing is, which gets elevated through its calculating portrayals of Rudolf and Hedwig through the figures of Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller.
Hüller is unsurprisingly great here, having one hell of a year with this film and a career-defining, Oscar-worthy performance in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, but it’s particularly interesting to observe Friedel here. It is arguably one of the most important films ever made about the Holocaust, and Friedel’s sotto voce reflections on its importance through interviews are a stark contrast to the disturbing portrayal of Höss he depicts on screen. Glazer doesn’t want the audience to sympathize with the man – there isn’t a single scene where some form of humanity is shown. Höss is a barbarian who contributed to one of the most inhumane acts of genocide ever committed and shows no signs of remorse, even when he discovers a human bone in a lake, passively moving on to the next step of his operation.
Perhaps the only time audiences see a glimpse of the real Höss happens late in the movie after he celebrates the deployment of Aktion Höss (Operation Höss). He slowly walks down the stairs of his Berlin office but stops to vomit violently. Nothing comes out, but the smell of the bodies, the bones he found in the river, and the consistent atrocities he has been hearing have taken a toll on him. He’ll never be able to live with himself for the genocide he helped commit, no matter how stern his demeanor is with other officers. He realizes it – with the film cross-cutting to the present-day, where janitors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum clean the crematoriums and an exhibit showing over twenty-five thousand shoes of the souls of the camp who were exterminated through Operation Höss. With this shot, Glazer’s message is clear: we must never forget and should never turn a blind eye to what is happening today. Just because it’s not happening to us does not mean it doesn’t exist.