The Zone of Interest: The Holocaust as Hidden Camera and Background Soundtrack

MOVIE INFO

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.

REVIEW:

The Zone of Interest a Holocaust film about Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, opens in idyllic blackness— to the sounds of birdsong, wind, river a kind of pre-edenic landscape to wonderful to be seen, only imagined. Instead of building calm, it creates unease because it’s going on too long, until the first human figures in their shimmering brightness appear in bright sunshine, green forest, slowly streaming river- a picnic is happening, a family is frolicking in nature. When it’s over black German cars crush through the grass, sharply swerving into an unpaved road. There would be other idyl moments but they would be interrupted by ashes falling from the sky and on their skin— the charred of Auschwitz saturating their nationalist socialist Edenic existence.

The director of Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, in order to create this quietly shattering portrait of family life in Nazi-era Germany needs to create two movies running parallel to each other. The idyl family domestic story is the one the audience sees. The horror film filled with occasional gunshots, the screams of men, women and children, barking guard dogs, shouted German commands is the one the audience hears. The horror is the reality and the Edenic family in its walled house is the illusion, or the truth that lives in willful ignorance of the reality behind the walls.

Here, death is reduced to a business decisions with quotas and efficiencies. The ethical is nonexistent in this environment. The children play with the teeth of the cremated. The wife thinks nothing of wearing a mink coat taken from an incinerated Jew. They tend house, garden and family ignoring the sounds and smokes of annihilation pouring over their high walls. Order and beauty has replaced emotion. We know that Hoss is efficient and very good at the business of death, promotion worthy material.

The Zone of Interest is about denial, the banality of evil. The Hoss’ rationalization of their inhumanity goes beyond just being oblivious. It’s something far more corroding, something truly timeless that has always existed in the dark spaces of the human soul, heart and mind- and waiting for the devils trinity to claim its throne from God. Nationalism, nativism and tribal arrogance swirl together into something like a fever, simmering just under the surface of the carefully cultivated life of people who call themselves “settler farmers” and “pioneers of the East.”

Glazer has filmed The Zone of Interest with a verite intimacy and a rigorous precision. Ten hidden camera and as many microphones capture the Hosses’ wandering with a documentary fervor. The authenticity enables form to follow content. Although it is based on a Martin Amis novel, the dialogue and situations are taken from actual conversations recounted by servants and other eye witnesses accounts from the Auschwitz archives. Mica Levi’s slashing, dissonant musical score gives the movie a rosy hued dream curdling into a nightmare quality. The coda shot amidst the present maintenance worker of Auschwitz and a night vision scene of a girl leaving hillside glowing apples for imprisoned workers are the only moments where The Zone of Interest deviates at all from the Hosses’ point of view.

There’s really no need for the graphic reality of Auschwitz to be seen. The soundtrack makes it an ever present horror puncturing and counterpointing the viewer’s sighted reality. The house doesn’t exist apart from the screams, the rifle shots, the billowing smoke of the crematories. Everything crawls into your mind and imagination. The movie is designed to haunt the audience deeply.

The Zone of Interest is a portal, challenging viewers to morph from spectators to participants, grappling with the enduring truth that everyone is capable of knowing evil when they see it, even when it suits their interests to look away.