The Zone of Interest
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Running time: 1hr45 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Christian Friedl (centre) in The Zone of Interest
I was telling a friend about The Zone of Interest — specifically, about why Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing, inverted Holocaust drama is my favourite film of the last year — and was, I admit, having a hard time selling it to her. It is a film set almost entirely within the household of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss in 1943, tracking him and his family as they go about their daily business — eating, sleeping, tidying, playing, tending the dahlias, revising plans for new execution chambers — while remaining phlegmatically indifferent to the mass death and torture happening on the other side of the garden wall. Its story is sparse and routine-fixated, its gaze detached and coolly observational in a manner that recalls Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman; anyone hoping for catharsis or comeuppance is likely to be disappointed.
“I’m not sure I want to see a film that humanises Nazis,” my friend said, and, well, fair enough. Except The Zone of Interest doesn’t have to humanise the Nazis at its centre — they’re already human. It’s easier and more comforting to believe that they weren’t; faced with any easy or comforting option, Glazer’s film firmly takes the opposite one. The easiest reading of the film is as a kind of visual demonstration of Hannah Arendt’s famous theory of “the banality of evil”: Certainly, as it shows Höss (Christian Friedl) fretting over matters of workplace productivity — as if he were trading in stocks and products rather than the murder of human beings — while his hausproud wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) fusses with bed linens, it proves that the truly evil, too, want nothing nothing more than to be normal. At first we marvel that the Hösses are an awful lot like people we know; the longer we sit with Glazer's calm, pitiless vision, the more we wonder if those people are, in fact, us. How many atrocities have we tuned out in favour of home comforts, letting ourselves off the hook by drawing clear dividing borders in our mind between life over here and life over there?
Life over there is never seen in Glazer’s film, though it is sometimes heard. Disembodied screams are carried over the wall by Johnnie Burn’s ingenious sound design, combining with the uncanny, atonal sonic shivers of Mica Levi’s score to sully the serenity of Höss family life — as visually represented by cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s hard, crisp, eerily orderly compositions. Glazer has always been a formally immaculate filmmaker: he delivers approximately one film a decade, and they tend to feel as if they’ve taken that long to construct and perfect. But that immaculacy takes on a darker subtext here. The Zone of Interest presents a vision of life at its most spartan and sterile — all right angles, hospital corners and mirror-shine polish — to dignify its ugly, bloody purpose.
And most radically, for a director who likes to exert exacting control over what we see, Glazer counts on our knowledge and memory of images from outside his film — of concentration camps and Nazi iniquities, gleaned from history books and documentaries and umpteen Holocaust films so very unlike this one — to give the images he presents here their grave and terrible power. We can’t keep them out of our minds, as our gaze drifts to that tall grey garden wall, and the rooftops and smokestacks just behind them; at the same time, we are shown how easy it can be to block them out. The Zone of Interest has a blaring moral conscience in its vast, hushed negative spaces; once you tune into it, it won’t leave you be.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023) Written by Jonathan Glazer | Shot by Łukasz Żal | Edited by Paul Watts