Best Pictures #97: Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: The Zone of Interest

 by A.J.

Best Pictures #97: Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

The Zone of Interest

“I wasn't really paying attention... I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room.”

There are several scenes of pleasant sunny days in the countryside: picnics, swimming, horseback riding, a family enjoying each other’s company, enjoying their lives. Everything on screen is meant to evoke the word “idyllic.” It certainly seems that way, but the family is that of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, and the camp itself is right on the other side of the wall of the family’s country estate. Nothing in The Zone of Interest, the first film in 10 years from director Jonathan Glazer, is played for shock or sensation. Unlike other Holocaust films, The Zone of Interest aims to unsettle and disturb its audience not in showing the atrocities inside Auschwitz but the cold indifference outside of Auschwitz. The film succeeds in this though that cold indifference hardly comes as a revelation.

There is very little story or plot. Glazer’s screenplay kept little of the novel by Martin Amis, aside from the premise and title. We do not get to know Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) or his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), so much as we observe them. There are very few close ups, no discussions of ideology or race or religion. The camera stays back and we catch snippets of their lives: the children show off collections of teeth they’ve found; Hedwig tries on a fur coat stolen from the latest group of victims; Hedwig’s mother wonders if her Jewish former employer is at the camp; the industrial sounds of trains and smokestacks mixed with distant shouting and gunshots are part of the everyday background noise. The closest the film comes to a plot is Hedwig’s concern over Rudolph’s transfer (he’s so good at his job he’s been promoted to an administrative position in Berlin) which threatens to disrupt or even end the lifestyle she loves (she is the “queen of Auschwitz” after all). 

Glazer, a music video director turned arthouse movie director, has managed to build a cult following around each of his films (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin). The Zone of Interest represents his most widely acclaimed film earning 5 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director for Glazer. However, this is still an art film with experimental elements. It begins with about two minutes of black screen with discordant music. At one point there is a flash to a solid red screen. A scene of a girl hiding apples in a field is shown in polarized black and white (in the background of a later scene we hear a guard shouting at a prisoner about an apple). These abstract flourishes function like unexpected and jarring punctuation but do not necessarily enhance the viewing experience. The only affecting flourish comes close to the end and involves a flash forward in time. 

We never see inside the death camp. This film means to unsettle us with what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” A scene of  concentration camp commandants discussing what to do about the Hungarian Jews plays like a bland bureaucratic office meeting. To everyone in that room it was, and to the Höss family the regular eruption of the smokestacks on the other side of the brick wall was more than normal. It was acceptable. Their lives were calm and mundane because they thought there was nothing wrong with the industrialized evil of the Nazis. The closest the film comes to a hateful outburst is Hedwig coldly telling her Polish house servant, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”

The Zone of Interest is well-done on just about every technical level, including the subdued performances from Friedel and Hüller, but overall it falls short of being an arresting film. Its detachment from the characters is meant to emphasize the detachment the characters have from the atrocities despite their physical proximity and involvement. That detachment, though key to the approach of director Glazer, makes for an intellectually interesting film but not an engaging one. The weight of what we see and don't see and only hear comes inherently from the subject matter and whatever knowledge of the Holocaust the viewer brings with them. The Zone of Interest is only effective when taken as part of the larger range of the Holocaust on film, including films like Schindler’s List, The Grey Zone, and the profoundly affecting, epic length documentary Shoah.