NEVADA CITY, Calif. February 8, 2024 – With clearer weather ahead, it’s worth getting out to see The Zone of Interest, a truly serious film for serious filmgoers about subject that, sadly, infuriatingly, remains with us still.
Now playing at The Onyx Theater, Nevada City, this haunting, compelling film opens with the title fading in on a black screen as Mica Levi’s ominous ambient score rumbles underneath. Another fade-in opens on a long shot of a family of ordinary-looking Deutsches Volk enjoying a bucolic afternoon on the banks of a lazy river. They could be any respectable bourgeois family anywhere, as plain and pleasant as beige walls. That they speak German is the only detail that sets them apart.
That evening, they return to their pleasant but non-descript home, with a sprawling backyard and a large well-manicured garden attached. The property sits flush against a large gray wall topped by barbed wire. In the distance stands a guard tower. From beyond the wall comes the churn of a busy factory at work, twenty-four seven.
But this is not just any German family. It’s the Höss family whose façade of normalcy falls away when master of the house Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) dons his Nazi SS uniform. Once we know the who, the when and the where come into focus: It’s 1943 and we’re at Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered–the name most synonymous with Nazi genocide and the human capacity for mass violence.
For four years, Rudolf Höss was the real-life commandant, and resident-in-chief, of Auschwitz. While committing his crimes on behalf of Hitler’s Reich, he and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) went about raising their five children without once looking up.
This film trusts us to get it, so none of the horrors are shown. Instead, we’re hypnotized by the sounds of factory life punctuated by occasional screams and gunshots that break the disturbing air of calm. All the while we’re wondering, Will any of it will ever break through to these people? The answer: no.
There’s not much story in this crushing irony, just a series of tableaus of family life that pass like museum dioramas. Little seems to disturb Rudolf Höss’s equanimity. While he contentedly admires a new canoe given by his family for his birthday, steam from a locomotive drawing miles of box cars carrying thousands of doomed prisoners, streams across the top of the frame. Moments like this and our awareness of history keep the film from feeling static.
Another question often asked is, “How could they!?” Rudolf Höss, an able bureaucrat and planner, would have sneeringly answered: “How? Like this,” while he hosts a meeting in his house with engineers and other Nazi officials to design better efficiencies for their death factory like dutiful industrialists, while, in the background, hausfrau Hedwig carries out her duties with maternal calm.
As I watched their children at innocent play, the question gnawed: While blameless, how would they ever deal with their awful legacy? Meanwhile, wastewater from the camp flushes through their favorite swimming spot, while human ashes are used to fertilize their prized gardens. You don’t see death directly, but you feel it everywhere.
The only sign of hope in this awful world is a young Polish neighbor girl who creeps about like a phantom in the night, stealing apples from the garden to leave for the prisoners, sequences that were developed in negative to create a contrasting tone of almost supernatural goodness against the horrible daytime reality.
Later, the story quickens when Rudolf Höss is transferred out to supervise other camps and supervise the removal and extermination of 430,000 Hungarian Jews. He’s done a fine job for his Führer, he has. But the news stirs wife Hedwig’s emotions to life with tears of outrage and betrayal that send Rudolf into a cringing retreat. She loves it here, this place where she’s known as “The Queen of Auschwitz,” a status she will not willingly surrender.
Writer-director Jonathan Glazer (adapting a Martin Amis novel unread by me) and cinematographer Lukasz Zal keep their multiple cameras at a watchful, almost clinical, distance, like scientists staring dispassionately into a petri dish as the Höss family go about their mundane lives. If they weren’t directly complicit in the slaughter of millions, they’d be utterly boring to everyone but themselves, almost perfect illustrations of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil.
The Zone of Interest is more illustrative than dramatic, each moment exactly composed within its frames. Even with the tight compositions, the film uses only natural light sources to avoid aestheticizing the horrors. For the household scenes, microphones were hidden throughout the house while multiple cameras were left running with no crew members on set to create a sense of verisimilitude for the actors that allowed them to improvise.
Glazer’s choice to shoot in this fashion is a brilliant stroke, creating a near-perfect realism, though it sometimes makes the performances hard to judge. No attempt is made to see these people as “characters” as such but as willing, half-conscious puppets of the malevolent forces above. Stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hütter carry out their tasks admirably.
After a brief side tour through the Holocaust Museum and its vile artifacts, the film ends with a scene of Rudolf Höss retching in an empty gray stairwell. You might mistake this for a glimmer of conscience, but I would not. The dull fanatic was long ago inured to his crimes. Whatever stress he experiences comes from the top, from his Führer, not from any regret. Bad guys rarely ever think they’re bad.
Yet, it’s a bit bothersome to close on such a banal, potentially nihilistic, moment. I kept anticipating a “bursting bubble.” Spared the horrendous violence, we also miss the satisfaction of watching the spectacle of Hedwig’s Teutonic privilege crumbling as the Red Army drives through her precious garden. But the ending—or stoppage—could be interpreted as a warning that such crimes are still being committed, even if at a smaller scale. You think this has stopped? Think again.
It’s also important not to see this portrait of willful innocence as a direct mirror of us and so become trapped by the syllogism: “These Nazis are middle class. You’re middle class. Therefore, you’re all Nazis.” Take The Zone of Interest not as a lecture about universal guilt but as a deadly serious alarm and a warning to distrust all surfaces, the dull, pleasant ones most of all. Evil can exist just over the next garden fence.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain Takes a Bullet” was a runner-up in last year’s Gold Country Writers’ Short Story Contest; his short story, “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” appeared in a recent issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark. He reviews movies regularly on Medium and may be found on Facebook.