THE ZONE OF INTEREST shows an evil that is far from banal
The Zone of Interest
Written and Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Starring Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller and Ralph Herforth
Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking
Runtime: 1 hour and 45 minutes
by Billy Russell, Staff Writer
The Zone of Interest is one of those movies that would be an incredible, if depressing, metaphor for the state of things today no matter when it was released. It’s about the Holocaust, but it’s really about so many things. It’s about humanity. It’s about evil. It’s about our desire to be happy. It’s about compartmentalizing horrors and ignoring them for our own benefit.
The film is about the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss (played here by Christian Friedel), and his attempt to make the perfect life for himself and his family in the housing units right outside the death camp. After a long day of work, he wanders his yard, he admires his garden, and there will be the distant crack of a gunshot being fired. Or, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) will be upset about some trivial thing that would realistically upset someone in real life, and behind her will be the flames and rising smoke from one of the incinerators–500 lives going up in smoke. And they’re willfully oblivious to it, tuning it out like so much background noise.
I live in Arizona, only mere miles away from detention centers where migrant families are separated and held without definite timelines. I’m not next door to these horrors, but watching the film, I couldn’t help but feel the metaphor in my very bones. All of us, everywhere, we are witness to human misery and we do our best to ignore it. The Höss family may be more explicitly involved in perpetuating evil, but we all of us whistle on our way to work and zero in with total tunnel vision to ignore upsetting misery all around us.
The Zone of Interest features no onscreen violence, no foul language, no sex or nudity, but remains absolutely horrifying. Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin) frames the offscreen violence as omnipresent, whether through the spewing smokestacks on the horizon, the distant gunfire, or the yells of guards just on the other side of the wall. Whatever happens is in the most graphic center of all: Our minds. We never explicitly see the violence, but we are paralyzed with fear and are forced to imagine them.
The horror of The Zone of Interest is in the juxtaposition of the mundanity of everyday life, with unspeakable, inconceivable evil. Perhaps that’s another reason why it was best to leave these things unseen. Whatever explicit imagery could be shown could never truly capture something so massive, so completely unimaginable as the Holocaust.
Though the film wisely doesn’t focus on the overall history and instead acts as a snapshot of everyday life, Rudolf Höss was a very powerful cog in a mechanism of mass death. His work resulted in 2.5 million murders, and another 1 million deaths through disease and starvation. 3.5 million dead Jews and others, and he’s responsible for them.
At one point, reality seems to hit him and he dry heaves, with only a bit of acid being vomited out. He doesn’t seem to be consciously aware, but subconsciously, the guilt is eating away at him. And while most people are happy to ignore the goings-on around them, his mother-in-law, gazing out her window at night during a visit to see her grandchildren, is stricken with fear and leaves, disgusted and damaged by what she’d been witness to.
The Zone of Interest, wisely, isn’t a depressing slog through its entire run time. It’s not interested in depressing audiences for the sake of shock. It wants to present to us a timeless story that’s as true then as it was now, and was before. There are moments of hope and glimmers of humanity at its best, while we see what it’s capable of at its worst.
Where a lesser film would relent on its premise of leaving horrors unseen and show the enactment of a large-scale initiative that murdered hundreds of thousands, The Zone of Interest does something else. In the film’s most powerful moment, Glazer cuts to the real life Auschwitz, which stands as a museum today. Workers come in before it opens, they sweep the chambers where millions had died and they clean the glass that houses thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes, wallets and other belongings to the murdered. Instead of witnessing death, we are shown the historical context and the enormity of the event. And it’s much more powerful.
The Zone of Interest is, of course, not an easy watch, but a necessary one. Some films transcend the medium and become something else. Not just a statement on life, but a religious experience of pure empathy. The Zone of Interest is a masterpiece.