The Zone of Interest

dir: Jonathan Glazer

2023

What is this film?

Whatever it is, it has very little in common with the book by Martin Amis that it’s supposedly based on.

I am pretty sure this is a horror film, one in which you never see the Holocaust itself, but you watch the people ‘enjoying’ its benefits adjacent to it. To be awfully glib, it’s like watching a version of Jaws where you never see the shark, or the shark’s victims, or even go on the water, but you spend all your time with the mayor of Amity Island and his wife, keeping the beaches open for fun and profit, going about their daily routines, looting stuff from the victim’s belongings, living their best lives.

It feels wrong to joke about such things, but all the same, if I’m not too offended, I might just uncancel myself and continue.

I’m not going to go into how the flick starts, because it’s all part of Glazer’s intention to not let us get comfortable at any time, but when there’s actual people on screen, it could be the Von Trapp family on summer holidays from The Sound of Music. The beauty of nature, them with all their super pale Aryan skin, enjoying their time outdoors. Quality family time spent together. No devices whatsoever.

Then they go home. What a nice house, what a happy, comfortable family. Lots of kids, lots of servants to help run the household, keep everything ship shape, gardeners to help in the garden. Nothing out of place, no one goes wanting.

Work / life balance wasn’t a well-known concept during the Third Reich and the Holocaust, but the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps is better placed than most in the messy work of genocide by having his villa located just outside the walls of the death factory. He and his family never have to see the unspeakable, unending, unbelievable horror that is occurring right next door.

But, like us, they hear it, but unlike us, they have to act like they hear nothing at all as they go about their idyllic lives.

Some military wives would resent having to uproot their families and move when their husbands are sent to a new posting, but not Hedwig Höss! (Sandra Hüller). This is the peak, the pinnacle that she’s always dreamed of! So what if they’re living right next to a death camp where millions of people are being exterminated and cremated? So what if the skies are all aglow at night, every night, with the fires burning constantly to dispose of the evidence of the ‘Final’ part of the ‘Final Solution’ problem?

And of the ashes that flow everywhere, permeate everything, infect everything? It is of little consequence. She gets her pick of fur coats and jewellery, taken from the ‘selected’, and has all the strudel and bratwurst that she or her family could ever need.

It’s not even like she’s turning a blind eye, or not hearing what she can clearly hear – she’s revelling in it. She revels in it. When her mother visits, she tells her that she’s finally reached the peak of aspiration. But they also talk about the woman whose house mum used to clean back in the day, and how glad she is that the woman was ‘rounded up’. Shame she was outbid for the woman’s curtains by another woman who lives across the street.

Damn shame. She really loved those curtains. Is that a pool AND a water slide?

But even the mother can’t stomach the atmosphere, and leaves, but not before leaving her daughter a note that irritates her profoundly.

And like many a hausfrau of the era, Frau Höss takes it out on the maids. She reminds one of them that she could easily have her husband spread the girl’s ashes across a field without blinking an eye.

Must be so delicious having the power of life and death over your Polish employees. Who could complain, other than your teenaged Polish employees / indentured servants?

It is hard to decide whether they’re terrible people revelling in living in terrible times, or whether they’re average people made worse by their horrific milieu.

Actually, I’ll be honest, it’s not hard at all. They’re the worst people ever, and we have practically no escape from them.

For me, it’s unusual to watch a film where the Nazis are the main characters, where they are the ones we spend all our time with. Always, unless it’s a propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl or Fox News, the Nazis are the villains. When they’re the main characters, at the peak of their awfulness, then it feels like a film is trying to overwhelm us with irony, with how horrifically ironic their ways and bourgeois expectations are.

How ironic it must be, we must think, that such awful, stupid people think they’re a master race, the pinnacle of humanity, when they are literally taking part in the worst that humanity can do, being genocide. A structured, mechanical, industrial genocide.

At exactly the halfway point of the movie, husband and wife are having an argument about how her husband is being posted to improve the efficiency of a concentration camp elsewhere, and she insists, insists, that she and the children should be allowed to stay.

At Auschwitz. She’s demanding to stay at Auschwitz.

Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) is not some guy who went along just to get along: he was a true believer Original Nazi, and was very efficient AND effective at his job. And his job was the extermination of Jews, and the disposal of their remains. Their bodies. At his trial he accounted for or agreed that the amount of people that were executed under his eye, on his watch, was 2.5 million people, predominately Jews. The rest (another million or so) he asserted, ever the details-oriented executive, died from starvation, disease or exposure.

He remembered the statistics. He was great at his job. No doubt he took pride in it. And that’s how he’s portrayed in the film. A doting father who reads stories to send his daughter to sleep, an attentive husband who accommodates his wife’s every whim, but also a man whose task it was to oversee an ever more efficient killing machine, with as much emotional connection to what he was doing as a shelfstacker at a supermarket has towards the objects they’re stacking on the shelves.

At a celebration in his honour, he tells his wife that at some point, looking down at a crowd of his high ranking Nazi peers who are feting him, he spent a fair amount of time doing the calculations on the logistics of gassing all the people in the room. How much time it would take, how many units of Zyklon B per person given the volume of the room, how long before the screaming stops…

What are we meant to feel watching this stuff? Well, what are usually meant to feel while watching a film made by Jonathan Glazer: the chap that made Birth, Sexy Beast, Under the Skin and now this film? None of them are anything like any of the others! I don’t think there’s any director that’s made 4 films that are so completely different from each other, but still linked by his austere, intensely focussed direction.

At a guess, considering those other flicks, he would want us discomforted, shocked, ill at ease, anxious and baffled. He’s effectively screaming at us throughout this flick “how could people go about their daily fucking lives in the midst of the Holocaust? How dare anyone turn a blind eye and ear to this?”

Ear, especially. Of course everything in the flick is meticulously constructed, every scene, every theme, but the work done on the sound design is staggering, horrifying and exceptional. The soundtrack / score is also terrifying, deliberately so. Any time it sounds like it’s close to pleasant, the notes eventually bend into something discordant and awful.

The performances almost don’t matter, but they’re perfect for the (baffling) material. I don’t know how she managed it, it must be a pure fluke, but Sandra Hüller, as a German actor, somehow got to be in two of the most critically celebrated films of 2023, both of which have been nominated for countless things, and it’s almost impossible to believe it’s the same actor. And her work here, as the stupid, brutal Hedwig Höss, could not be more different from the heroic work she does in Anatomy of a Fall as the wife accused of murder. She’s amazing, but of course here she plays a far more terrible character, one who actually existed, who lived a full life and died in 1989.

1989. Six million plus Jews, and countless war dead on all sides didn’t get to live full lives and die in 1989, Hedwig, you loathsome monster.

The last element that I want to refer to is the ending, which is staggering, just staggering. It’s inspired, as in, there is genius in what Glazer and his artistic collaborators created, but it’s something so dark and so painful that I almost wish I’d not seen it. The manner in which Höss, finally perhaps feeling something for all the pure evil that he has done, pauses in his Naziness, but it occurs in a space which intercuts scenes with cleaners cleaning the exhibits at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the present.

The awfulness of what these people did, and what others allowed to happen, persists to this day and every day. It extends into the future, defying linearity, defying excuses. It has infected everything.

I don’t know if it’s an admonition (of those in the past), or a warning (not to let it happen again) in the present. But it’s something. It’s something unlike almost everything you’ve ever seen, or felt.

9 times the banality of evil is nothing compared to the evil of those who wish to bring fascism and nationalism back into the present out of 10

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“The life we enjoy is very much worth the sacrifice” – no doubt everyone agrees with you - The Zone of Interest