The Zone of Interest
Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s also the pathway to unimaginable evil
Jonathan Glazer contemplates the banal evils of the Nazi regime in The Zone of Interest.
Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) has finally gotten her dream life. A large home with a full staff, a pool, a greenhouse with a flourishing garden, and free clothing and baubles delivered to her door. As far as she’s concerned, hearing a few screams and gunshots every day is nothing to worry about.
Hedwig is married to Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Her lovely little dream house shares a garden wall with one of the greatest monuments to human suffering and evil ever created. But Hedwig doesn’t mind, in fact, she fashions herself the Queen of Auschwitz — and she thrives on her husband’s importance in the Nazi party and the wealth and regard it’s brought them.
What’s a little genocide when you can grow your own kohlrabi?
The most disturbing film of the year (even though it’s only rated PG-13), director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a brilliant look at humanity’s ability to ignore things when it suits their purpose. Hedwig’s zone of interest is her home and the sense of power it affords her, anything outside of that is blithely ignored. Glazer’s film examines what happens when we allow our own comfort to blind us to the realities around us.
Though the film plays out like a domestic drama about a couple who doesn’t want to move from their nice home, the real movie is just out of sight, hinted at via sound design and subtle shots. Glazer assumes that the viewer has a knowledge about what went on just behind the garden wall. As his subjects don’t want to think about it, he avoids it as well. The result is not the erasure of the Holocaust, but the magnification of it. As hard as Hedwig may try to ignore what’s happening literally feet from her idyllic life, there’s no denying what’s actually happening.
Nothing seems horrifying on the surface — a servant spreading ashes in the garden, the rumbling of a furnace constantly in the background — but the context behind the sounds and images makes for harrowing viewing. Glazer excels at subtly disturbing tweaks to scenes, which ratchets up the tension and unsettles viewers.
Glazer films The Zone of Interest with a detached eye, like the cameras hidden in a reality show. The result is a troublingly bland look at the everyday lives of monsters. Nazis took time out of committing war crimes to fuss with plants in the garden and worry about career advancement. By making the film seem impersonal, as if Glazer is passively capturing the lives of the Höss family, he allows Rudolf and Hedwig to condemn themselves. It’s their detachment, their willingness to discuss whether the Jews they knew before the war were taken for extermination as they take their tea, that makes them so unforgivably evil.
Sound editor Maximilian Behrens does essential work in the film, creating an ambient soundtrack that is truly the stuff of nightmares. The constant churning from the crematorium, the sporadic bursts of gunfire, and the occasional screams all work together to make a disconcerting atmosphere, one that the Höss family blithely ignores.
Glazer’s film is not just a disturbing exercise. It’s a challenge for viewers to recognize in themselves the tendency to disregard that which would challenge our comfortable existence. The banality of evil makes the characters more frightening because it allows us to see ourselves in them. If you see evil and say nothing, you become complicit, no matter how hard you try not to see it. It’s a powerful message and one that needs contemplation in the current geopolitical climate.
Verdict: Jonathan Glazer highlights the evils of everyday existence in this masterpiece.
The Zone of Interest is rated PG-13 and is available in theaters January 19.
