THE ZONE OF INTEREST

"I wasn't really paying attention... I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room." - Rudolf Hoss

The Zone of Interest sells an Elysian slice-of-life portrayal of a German family’s frivolity. Hillside picnics give way to giggling children playing in rivers, and sunny weather brightens a lush, expansive garden. Maids cleaning the home and preparing meals seem well accustomed to their hosts' whims and appetites. Neighboring children come to play on a summer day shrieking down the backyard pool’s waterslide while the camera captures adolescents kissing on the side of the house. A lazy, peaceful existence, that is, until a man wearing striped prison clothes approaches the house delivering a wheelbarrow of supplies. Dropping off his wares, he takes the husband’s previously discarded dirty boots and replaces them with clean ones. The camera follows him as he walks along the property’s western wall, topped with coils of barbed wire while plums of smoke billow into the distance from buildings on the other side. Indiscriminate shouting can be heard alongside scattered gun shots, because this is 1940’s German occupied Poland. And that home belongs to the family of Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. 

Director Jonathan Glazer attempted to reanimate the daily lives of Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller) as accurately and untainted as possible. Glazer studied journal records from the Auschwitz Museum from survivors who worked for the Hoss family to piece together character profiles. Cameras were concealed in and around the property with no crew present so that the actors could exist and experiment freely. In an attempt to not ‘aestheticize’ Auschwitz, Glazer only used natural and practical lighting. Huller’s own dog Dilla was even used in the film as well, all in a successful attempt to capture an intrinsic stream-of-consciousness sliver of daily operations in the garden on the other side of the wall. 

Glazer’s hands-off naturalism presents a narrative feature almost remiss of a plot. Hedwig and Rudolf giggle with each other as they lay in bed at night. Their children splash water at each other by the river’s edge. Hedwig scolds their maids to cook meals properly and clean up messes promptly. Nothing really happens… and that is the film’s entire point. Every single second of the film exists outside of the camp, making a cognizant decision to separate a Nazi Commandant’s blissful lifestyle from his ‘work’. Friedel imbues a calm demeanor to the genocidal Commandant character; a man maintaining a constant state of household pacification. He tucks his restless daughter into bed at night and treasures his bullish wife––the portrait of a loving father who, working and living in a different time and place, could have been considered a good man. His ethereal dominion survives due to the colorful facade he peddles and the generational compartmentalization he passes down to his children.         

Peppered throughout these lazy summer days are small reminders of the Hoss’ cognitive consonance; their children getting scrubbed down after human remains are found in the river, Rudolf having tea during a meeting with engineers about the most efficient way to utilize gas chambers, Hedwig’s mother leaves in the dead of night after watching the furnaces burn orange in the darkness. Not only are they required to be there, they want to be. Whether Hedwig married into the Nazi belief system or supported it from the start we do not know, but her passionate aversion to Rudolf’s location transfer solidifies her monstrous character, considering the transfer is due to Rudolf’s success in his organized systematic slaughter. She built this home and life on literal Jewish bones and she would rather bask in their ashes and lull herself to sleep with their screams than leave this ostentatious lifestyle behind. 

The horror of the concentration camp next door is never visually present because to these Nazi higher-ups, the skin-trade is just a means to an end. The only historical indication of the death camp on the other side of the wall comes from sound designer Jonnie Burns’ extensive sound library. Compiled witness events and a map of Auschwitz helped Burns create distant-accurate sound ranging from gunshots, furnaces and human shouts. The film’s sound designates itself as its own entity; a looming presence with constant auditory reminders of what the Hoss’ choose to ignore. Alongside this phantom sound design is Mica Levi’s tormented score, encapsulating one of the most succinct audible pairings of the decade. Burns and Levi create a grating, well-oiled sound machine. When viewers aren’t being pelted with gutturally hair-raising musical accompaniments, we’re reminded constantly of the massacre hidden from view.  

The harrowing desensitization instills a grosser viewing experience. The film’s dramatic irony rationalizes none of the picturesque utopia lazily transpiring. The viscerality and gut-wrenching nature of the film is found in the absence of any exposure to the inner workings of Auschwitz, only distant screams and gun-fire during a placid summer day. Among these shunned sounds are scattered moments of human depravity, and because normalcy and everyday operations blanket the film in such an instinctive way, these instances twist this Aryan Garden of Eden into Lucifer’s first Hells-cape. As a Jewish slave slowly unbuttons her shirt before Rudolf in a secret basement room and as Rudolf cleans himself off afterwards, the film instills a perpetual roiling of nausea... thanks to the introduction to a different form of Nazism’s willful ignorance––one almost more effective in its silence than displayed aggression.      

Glazer’s vision portrays a heinously disturbing rendition of human nature. These men, and by extension their families and neighbors, are cogs in a machine of typical systematic hierarchy: follow orders, do your job well, profess constant loyalty, and in return you will be rewarded with status and monetary security. The film’s condamnation subsits not in the known actions of the few, but in the willful ignorance of the many. How many times has humanity stood by and witnessed the suffering of others? How many times do we as individuals bow our head and trudge to the drummed status quo? Though poignant and mortifying in subject matter and direction alone, The Zone of Interest is more than just a Holocaust film, it is a reflection and commentary of human corruption. The whims of human ambition and governance influence one's dissociative abilities and mental detachment, as seen by a Commandant and his family who live encased by flower bushes and an air of joyous freedom.