Film Review: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Image: The Zone of Interest

Few films carry such a weight with them as does Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, and fewer still could convey that historical burden with the painful success that it accomplishes. A decade on from Under the Skin, Glazer returns with the chilling and intimate fly-on-the-wall view into the lives of Rudolph Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, and his young family who lived immediately adjacent to the camp. It is a visceral penetrating delve not so much into the perpetrators of the abysmal, but into its unquestioning accessories – the people living both literally, and figuratively, within the shadow of the Holocaust.  

As expected for a project that has been ten years in the waiting, The Zone of Interest is intricately researched, and meticulously assembled; filmed largely using unmanned cameras deployed around a house remarkably similar, and close, to the original in Poland, it was set up to allow the cast to fully immerse within their roles with minimal intervention. The viewer is an unseen guest within the house, a direct witness to every meal, conversation, and family event. It’s Bafta-winning minimalist soundtrack meanwhile, composed largely of unnerving industrial jolts of noise, punctuates without warning – unforgiving hammer blows driving home the bleak realities of systematic evil and complicit indifference.

‘The idea of eavesdropping felt like the way to show the drama’ Glazer tells the BBC, ‘- although there is no drama’. It’s that lack of strong histrionics, the absence of theatre within the narrative, that makes the message of The Zone of Interest hit home with ruthless force. This film is taking you nowhere fast – but that’s exactly the point. It will slowly drag us through the nauseating contrast of utopia and misery, coexisting cheek to cheek. We are faced with the monotony of what on the very surface could be taken for a normal family life, slowly unfolding before us, set against a backdrop of unrelenting evil to which they are complicit. When what we are shown within the Höss household feels almost familiar, there’s little distraction from the horrors which remain largely unseen, but persist unceasingly in the background. We witness birthday celebrations, a father reading a story to his children at night, a young family enjoying playing in their swimming pool, all the while a soundscape of suffering resonates, every gunshot and cry thrown into sharp relief, whilst the glow of the incinerators permanently haunts nighttime scenes. With the focus on the family, rather than the camp itself, Glazer aims for the viewer to be ‘confronted by a reflection of ourselves on some level’.

It’s this theme of ordinary people, much like ourselves, abetting the most appalling acts, that is so central to The Zone of Interest. Even more so than with Rudolf Höss himself, it is apparent most prominently when viewed through his wife, Hedwig. First and foremost, her role within the film is of a mother, the powerful matriarch of domestic life in the Höss household, trying to create, and maintain, her own Garden of Eden lifestyle. Increasingly however, this unflawed idyll begins to grate – building into an attrition of sickly self-absorption. She is concerned solely with her house, family, and garden – the world outside, with the exception of Italian spa holidays, may as well not exist. There is to be no doubt as to her knowledge of what goes on within sight of her kitchen window however – as she reminds one of the young women working in her house – their life was very much in the hands of her husband, and by extension, herself. Particularly difficult to stomach is her aggrieved petition to Höss to convince him to prevent their transfer away from Auschwitz, as he is moved into a new role within the Nazi murder machine. The indignation that their Führer-sponsored ‘living space’ is to be taken away could not clash any harder with the realities of the 1.1 million who were robbed of absolutely everything within Auschwitz.

Their losses remain largely out of sight, but painfully pervasive and omnipresent on the mind. The dichotomy between the nonchalance of the Höss family, seemingly numbed to the realities of the system in which they are willingly embedded, and the inescapable allusions for the viewer to the atrocities meted out beyond their garden wall, is stark and crushing.

Glazer’s unsympathetic spotlight on all the facets of humanity is unmissable, unforgettable, and potently relevant.

Verdict: 5/5