[This review contains descriptions of rape and genocide.]
The Zone of Interest (2023)
dir. Jonathan Glazer
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2023 A24
“I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
These words are spoken in The Zone of Interest – director Jonathan Glazer’s utterly transfixing and horrifying film about the Holocaust – over a breakfast table as the woman who utters them eats her morning eggs.
If you didn’t know the actual words used and were asked to guess at what was being said using her tone, the surroundings, and the action, you might say that this woman was reminding the young lady serving the meal that the salt and pepper shakers need to be brought to the table, or that the coffee isn’t quite up to par this morning. She seems a little put out, but delivers the very real threat of murder like she’s annoyed that the napkins are folded incorrectly.
Here lies the sickening magic at the heart of Glazer’s nauseatingly potent picture. We don’t witness a single act of violence over the course of The Zone of Interest’s 104 minutes, yet it succeeds as a deeply disturbing portrait of what political theorist, historian, and philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.”
Arendt knew what she was talking about; she fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after being arrested for her illegal research into antisemitism.
It took Glazer ten years to get his vision on the screen, beginning work on it before the book that his film is very loosely based on was even published. That book’s main characters – the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp and his wife – are fictionalized versions of the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig. In addition to his reign over the infamously sadistic operations of Auschwitz, Höss was a leading figure involved in implementing Hitler’s Final Solution.
As with his mesmerizing and unsettling 2013 film Under the Skin, Glazer used the source material for The Zone of Interest as more of a jumping off point than anything else. He ditched the fictionalized characters and, after extensive research into the Hösses, made the actual Rudolf and Hedwig the focus of the movie. Part of Glazer’s research involved getting special permission to comb through the Auschwitz Museum archives, where he studied testimony from some of the people “employed” at the Höss household.
This bloodless film about one of the bloodiest periods in human history is remarkable for the tension between what we actually see on screen and what we know is happening right on the other side of the brick wall separating the concentration camp from the Hösses’ dream home, which affords them the life they’ve always dreamt of living.
Juxtaposed with a scene of Hedwig proudly showing off her house to her visiting mother – the Hösses have a lovely little swimming pool with a slide in the back yard for their five children, and Hedwig diligently and lovingly tends to the many items growing in her private garden – is a scene of Rudolf reviewing and improving plans for a new crematorium design. This innovation in design includes four chambers so that two can be cooling from use as the other two are warming up, enabling it to run twenty-four/seven.
We see this shocking, evil advancement in human depravity as lines on sheets of blueprint paper. Höss and his engineers cooly discuss the implementation of this new design like they might discuss ways of running vehicles through a car wash to achieve maximum efficiency.
The main point of conflict in The Zone of Interest comes when Rudolf, because he has excelled at his job like no other, is promoted, meaning he and his family must relocate so that Rudolf can more easily perform his new job of overseeing the whole of the Nazi concentration camp system.
Hedwig is devastated at the news. She and her husband have worked so hard to build and furnish this dream home, and now they must leave it all behind. Her reaction speaks to the way that the human flaw of narcissistic solipsism can make people excuse unimaginable horrors in the pursuit of personal gain.
Early in the film, we see Hedwig and a few friends root through a freshly delivered box of expensive garments. Take whatever you like, Hedwig tells her friends. One woman comments that the lovely garment she’s chosen is ripped, but can be mended. We’re never told where these garments came from, but we know all too well.
A few seconds later, we see Hedwig trying on a new (to her) fur coat. Jokes are made about finding a diamond in a confiscated tube of toothpaste. The person who found it put in an order for as much toothpaste as she could get, just in case.
A few months ago, I was sickened to hear someone within earshot of me casually remark that there are a lot of good Black people, but there are also “useless” N-words who are the real problem (this person, as you can probably imagine, did not use the sanitized version of this most hateful, sickening slur). I was absolutely disgusted that anyone would feel empowered to say something so ignorant and deplorable right out loud.
Disgusted, but not surprised.
You can draw a straight line from this instance of casual bigotry to the acts of genocide that are perpetrated when those in power make it permissible to enact violence on people for no other reason than who they are or what they believe. Jewish people — as well as many others — were sent to the camps during the Holocaust because those in power told the German people that it was right, just, and proper for them to be there.
One of Arendt’s arguments for the concept of the banality of evil is the “just following orders” defense of many of the Nazis put on trial after World War II, Höss among them. For the people who weren’t in power, “going along to get along” is the civilian bromide used to justify looking the other way.
At one point in the film, Hedwig remarks to her mother that the people in the camp on the other side of the wall are “in there for a reason.” She calls them a bunch of Bolsheviks. As long as those guarding the camps say the people inside deserve to be there, why should anyone question it?
(Does any of this sound familiar? Here in the States, a favorite rightwing reactionary tactic is to call anyone who stands up to them “communists” who must be destroyed. There’s no doubt in my mind that, as an atheist and Marxist, should the worst happen and Trump returns to office, on a long enough timeline I would eventually be sent to the camps he has promised to build during a second term.)
We know, to our core, that what’s happening is wrong.
Glazer signals that wrongness in an unimaginably powerful way. There are no acts of violence depicted during The Zone of Interest – at one point, the movie even cuts from Höss as he’s about to rape one of his prisoners, to the aftermath, as he’s cleaning himself up in order to join his wife in bed – but the film makes it impossible to escape the sounds of violence.
The Höss family are protected from the sights of the horrors in the camp, but you can’t block sound with a wall. For practically every minute of Glazer’s excruciating film, we, and the characters in the film, are subjected to screams of pain and fear, near constant gunshot reports, and the low, unsettling thrum of the furnaces. To hear that low, steady roar running constantly while also knowing what is burning is to face losing your sanity.
Yet millions of people got up each morning and headed in to work in Germany during the 1930s and ‘40s, telling themselves that all was well.
A few years ago, I read Milton Mayer’s profoundly disturbing book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45. In the book, Mayer relates the story of one of his interview subjects being shocked when his own young son began screaming at a crowd of prisoners, shouting the words, “Jew swine!” at them. The man was astonished at what had happened not only to his country, but to his own son.
We’re all doing the same now, even as genocides and oppression are happening the world over. I don’t believe in a hell, but if there is one, not one of us should escape spending eternity there.
The most heartbreaking scene in the film comes as we watch one of the Höss children, a little boy of about seven or eight, receiving an unintentional lesson in cruelty from his father. As the boy sits on his bedroom floor, playing with a set of dice, he hears a scuffle outside his window on the other side of the camp wall. We then hear a guard detain a prisoner for fighting over an apple. Once Commandant Höss hears the details, his ruling is swift and final: “Drown him in the river.”
(In that moment, I couldn’t help but think of the millions of people in my own country who brush off police killings of Black people for something as trivial as shoplifting or selling loose cigarettes on the street because, “they shouldn’t have been breaking the law.”)
Höss’s son by this point has risen and walked to the window. He stands, looking apprehensive as he whispers the words, “Don’t do that again,” to himself. The moment is quietly and irrevocably devastating.
And, of course, the description above is only a secondary horror. We should not let The Zone of Interest let us forget that the ultimate act of violence here isn’t what the little boy learns, but that a human being was callously murdered for no greater crime than being hungry and desperate.
Glazer uses other formal techniques to disorient and further put us ill-at-ease. In one moment, the camera lingers on a beautiful red flower in Hedwig’s precious garden. As the entire screen slowly dissolves to the matching shade of red, we hear, as always, faintly and in the distance, a man crying out in agony. We don’t know what’s happening to the man, which allowed my mind to fill in the blanks with any number of unspeakable horrors.
In the final minutes of The Zone of Interest, Glazer crafts one of the most formally explosive sequences I’ve ever encountered in cinema, and it’s done in near complete silence. As this movie is impossible to spoil, I don’t feel hesitant in describing it. Through the power of cinema, the director suddenly and without warning cuts from 1945 to the present day for our only look inside the camp.
We see placid scenes of workers going about cleaning the facility, which is now a memorial to those who lost their lives there, in preparation for its opening for the day. We see thousands of prisoners’ shoes preserved behind glass as a testament to the countless people who suffered there. A vacuum runs quietly as we see striped prisoner uniforms, also displayed behind glass. The movie then abruptly cuts back to Höss, who is repeatedly retching without ever actually being able to vomit.
It’s a history lesson, but it’s also a warning. And it’s a warning we haven’t yet heeded, even after almost a century of hindsight.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
The Zone of Interest is one of the most chilling cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. It should be mandatory viewing in high school and college history classes around the world.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Glazer’s opening sequence, in which the Höss family is seen enjoying an Edenic idyll, is evocative of Leni Riefenstahl’s focus on nature in many of her films. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
- A series of sequences showing an unknown girl riding her bike to prisoner work sites after dark to hide food for them is presented in negative to lend an otherworldly feel to them. We never find out who this girl is, but during research for the review, I discovered that she was based on a real 12-year-old resistance fighter during the war. The bike used in the film and the dress the character wears belonged to her real-life counterpart.
- I didn’t mention the acting, but that’s partially because it’s all so understated. As Rudolph, Christian Friedel crafts a no-nonsense bureaucrat who thinks nothing of his work causing the suffering and death of millions. Sandra Hüller, doing yeoman’s work last year in both this and Anatomy of a Fall, is exceptional as Hedwig. Hüller had vowed to never portray a Nazi, but when she read Glazer’s screenplay, she couldn’t turn it down.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this via a FYC screener disc. The Zone of Interest is now playing in select theaters in the wake of it’s Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, several public figures remarked that liberals were wishing for the newly elected Trump to be a failure. (I seem to remember Bryan Cranston remarking on this phenomenon.) They said that wishing for then-President Trump to fail was tantamount to wishing for America to fail. These celebrities chided liberals for holding such an opinion. Never mind the fact that they never actually produced any evidence of real people saying these sorts of things.
Almost a decade later, the very people elected to positions of power and authority in government are actively and openly sabotaging efforts to fix what they claim is a catastrophe on our southern border. They’ve been screaming for months that President Biden is derelict in his duty to secure the border and that it must be fixed NOW!
But, because their cult leader, Donald Trump, wants the southern border to be a live issue in the upcoming election that he can use to attack Biden, he has told congressional Republicans to reject the bipartisan deal on immigration currently on the table. He, and they, want America to fail because they want to win an election.
Please click here for a more complete rundown of the situation.