The Zone of Interest - Review Thread

If there’s one filmmaker I’ve never quite gotten a grip on it’s probably Jonathan Glazer, or at least Jonathan Glazer as a feature filmmaker. Glazer, who was one of the standout voices of the golden age of artsy music videos back in the 90s was extremely identifiable when he was making music videos for cool bands like Radiohead but his feature films have seemed a lot more distinct to me. I remember his feature film debut Sexy Beast, being a pretty populist crime comedy, essentially just a well-made riff on the kind of thing Guy Richie was making around the same time which sported an against type performance by Ben Kingsley. I actually never saw his follow-up film Birth (it’s on the to-do list) but I did see his third film Under the Skin, a sort of science fiction film which didn’t feel much like Sexy Beast at all and more closely resembled his out there music video work but with added experiments like a sort of candid camera element. His newest film, The Zone of Interest I guess carries over that film’s interest in observing people in daily life but beyond that it’s kind of another pivot into historical realism and he’s generally dealing with much more serious material than what he’s generally known for.

The Zone of Interest is an adaptation of a novel by Martin Amis, which was a fictionalized imagining of the day to day life of Rudolf Höss, a real SS officer who was the longest serving commandant at Auschwitz, and his family. Here we look at Höss (Christian Friedel) right as he’s in position running the infamous death camp but we don’t follow him while he’s in the middle of this, rather the film mostly takes place in the large house he lives in right outside the walls of the camp and the chillingly mundane life he and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and kids lead when he comes home from “work.” We see them as they do chores, throw dinner parties, entertain the in-laws, and show off their gardens all while we see the familiar towers and barbed wire topped walls of Auschwitz just sitting in the background while these people have banal conversations, consumed much more with making career plans than they are with the genocide happening literally right in their backyard.

The phrase “the banality of evil” was coined by Hannah Arendt when chronicling the belated 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high ranking Nazi who is said to have never set foot in a death camp or personally killed anyone with his own hands but who sat in his office and coldly orchestrated a mass murder through doing mundane paperwork about the logistics of travel and allocation of resources, the kind of logistical engineering necessary to kill six million people as chillingly laid out by the historian Raul Hilberg in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Eichmann himself is casually mentioned in a conversation between Nazi officers at one point in The Zone of Interest in much the way one would expect workers to discuss someone high up on their company’s org chart when going over company politics. It’s an invocation that had to be knowing because “the banality of evil” is plainly the concept at the heart of this movie and which will almost certainly come up when discussing it and in many ways it’s even more chilling here because it suggests that Rudolf Höss, a man who most certainly got his hands much dirtier than Eichman, could be just as banal.

It is not, however, Rudolf Höss whose evil stands out the most to me in The Zone of Interest so much as the rest of his family and that’s in part because their complicity in this atrocity strikes a bit closer to home in its parallels to modern life. Hedwig Höss isn’t actively working on behalf of the “final solution” like her husband is but she is plainly not ignorant of what is happening behind the walls she’s living next to and is in many ways just as if not more cold about it than Rudolf. Early in the film we hear her casually gossiping about how a friend showed up to an event in a dress that “belonged to some little Jewess half her size” as if the fashion faux pas is the biggest issue being described in that scenario. Later on, when informed that the family could be transferred to some other base, she actively protests such a move because she’s so proud of the home she’s built and can’t imagine leaving… a truly baffling attitude to hold about a piece of real estate in such a location. Even more disturbing is consider that this couple have several very young children that they are raising in this environment who are even more acclimated to this existence, and one has to wonder what it will one day be like for them to look back on this childhood.

And yet what’s in many ways disturbing about both the character of Hedwig and the movie as a whole is that, while most of us are nowhere near as responsible for violence as these characters are, there is something at least somewhat relatable about the callousness they sometimes display while living a life of relative luxury in a world filled with pain and suffering because we all do that to some degree. I may not live outside of Nazi death camps like these people but I don’t have to drive too far in order to find a homeless encampment likely filled with miserable people I haven’t lifted a finger to help. Similarly I’m not wearing clothing stolen from someone being interred at a concentration camp but I doubt I’d like what I found out if I bothered to look into the working conditions at the factories my clothing does come from. I also don’t work for literal Nazis but at the same time I’ve definitely worked for companies that could be described as “soulless corporations” and would rather not think to hard about ever questionable thing they’ve done that I’ve in some remote and removed way been a party to. To some extent “looking the other” way is just a standard coping mechanism that’s become a standard part of the human condition, to not engage with the world in such a way would drive you mad, but it is something you want to stop and think about from time to time and seeing a rather extreme version of it here does drive that home.