The Zone of Interest opens in theaters December 15. This review is based on a screening at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
The Zone of Interest is about more than just the banality of evil. Historian Hannah Arendt coined that phrase while covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961, so it’s understandable that it would become a shorthand for explaining what writer-director Jonathan Glazer is depicting in his new film about the unsettlingly serene life of an Auschwitz commandant. A movie that’s like drinking poison for 105 minutes, The Zone of Interest observes Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who resides in a luxurious home with his wife and children while carrying out an atrocity at the concentration camp next door. Glazer’s extremely loose adaptation of the late Martin Amis’ novel is an annihilating experience, one that invites existential dread but defies easy categorization. It’s also one of the best films of this or any year.
When we first meet Rudolf and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), they’re enjoying a beautiful day by the water. But the image looks drained of life. There’s a starkness to the way the scene is shot by cinematographer Łukasz Żal: A snapshot of a family life irredeemably corrupted. We soon see how the Höss family lives richly while entire generations of Jewish people are being slaughtered. Rarely is this discussed by the two central characters, but it doesn’t need to be: Glazer’s devotion to confronting the realities of what this horror truly feels like speaks volumes.
The silence with which the Hösses go about leisure and labor is shattering. We never see the violence carried out – the closest we get is one shot of Rudolf standing directly in the center of the killing, coldly detached from the screams that surround him – but it’s always on our minds. There is no need to depict the immensity of the devastation because we feel it in every moment – how the characters have made themselves numb to death despite being in the eye of the storm.
Crucially, the film doesn’t fall prey to such dehumanization. It refuses to make the Holocaust into a cinematic spectacle. Just as importantly, The Zone of Interest doesn’t humanize the Höss family as much as it reveals how they’ve left whatever remained of their humanity behind in tatters. Terrifyingly, we realize how anyone could contort themselves into such a state – and it would probably look like swimming and gardening while the cacophony of mass murder grows ever louder.
It all makes for one of the most horrifying, sickening, and monstrous visions ever put on screen. Each and every shot of domesticity acts as a cinematic scalpel, where what is being excised is more gruesome than any horror-movie carnage. The Zone of Interest creates a state of abject terror through formal precision: The shots are often static, with the angles and framing in the house remaining consistent, frankly yet frighteningly showing how maddeningly ordinary this situation has become. Much of this also comes from the sounds that the majority of the characters pretend they can’t hear – a layered, expertly mixed and edited din of agony that swallows the quiet murmur of a day at the beach and eventually arrives at the Hösses’ doorstep, unrelenting. A spectacular yet pointedly sparse score by composer Mica Levi is further used to instill even a scene of walking down a path with overwhelming dread.
Levi previously worked with Glazer on his 2013 masterpiece Under the Skin, and while The Zone of Interest is slightly less effective than that prior work, it’s still one of the 21st century’s most monumental and significant pieces of cinema. It’s the type of film that’s constantly breaking free of any conceptions we have of how this medium functions. Each cut takes us deeper and deeper into the rhythms of a life that is defined by death; every shot may seem simple in isolation, but in total they amount to a foundational work that demands attention. Classifying The Zone of Interest as being just about the banality of evil is to merely scratch the surface.
In key moments, Glazer calls our attention to the way this mass murder is not something the family has distanced themselves from. At one point, they are presented with the opportunity to leave Auschwitz while still reaping the benefits of their status. It’s Hedwig who insists on staying, saying that she’s happy with the life they’ve built for their children. At first, it seems like she’s clinging to the nice garden and the material pleasures they’ve accumulated. When you sit with it longer, though, it’s apparent she’s found comfort in proximity to cruelty – is maybe even enamored of it. After all, a garden and a pool could be rebuilt somewhere else. It is here where she wants them.
In this moment, the front Hüller has built disappears entirely into the character’s desperation. Where much of her performance to this point is more understated, this is the moment a hunger for power takes over. It is both pitiful and petrifying. When given the choice, Hedwig chooses to maintain a home where her neighbors are turned to ash every day.
Even as the meetings discussing how to better and more efficiently carry out a genocide are expressed with the cold cadence of listing off chores, The Zone of Interest lays bare something more than routine. There’s nothing ordinary about what’s happening because every choice, every command, means more death. Importantly, recurring disruptions via night-vision shots don’t let us settle into stasis with the characters. It’s an act of resistance, both narratively and formally, of the utmost importance.
Glazer isn’t just replicating the cruel machinations of the characters. Instead, he’s holding them up to the light so that we can see just how truly callous and self-serving they are. In a film in which the horror happens in broad daylight and those responsible are miles beyond the point of no return, this proves to be absolutely essential in the search for some sort of an answer as to why anyone would ever do such a terrible thing. The truth is that all of those involved, whether they say it aloud or not, would bury the bodies under the garden in order to throw a party there the very next day. Glazer invites us into this house, though he never lets us become at home there. Instead, we must forever contend with those who did.
