Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer
How do we live with the weight of our actions, especially if those actions are representative of evil incarnate? Does the guilt plant a germ that grows into self-hatred so strong it makes us wretch, doubled-over in agony like our body is trying to turn itself out?
In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, the answer is no. Humanity, even a trace of it, can be lost to us, and for every fleeting instance it might try to make itself known, there’s a damning lifetime of its suppression to be reckoned with. Exhibit A: Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, the warden and “queen” of Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Glazer’s protagonists.
They live in idyl, and we open with a shot of them on a family outing. Nestled in a green Eden overlooking a nearby river, they bathe, pick berries, their children play like kids do, and their parents look on with satisfaction at the life they’ve built. The next morning, the children surprise their father with a gift, a small rowboat, and they clamor to be the first to go down river with him, their affection obvious. The scene plays out in a neat, sunbathed garden facing up to a gray concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Beyond it, agonized screams are faintly heard, and gunshots go pop on the breeze.
Höss is inspired by the real-life Höss who oversaw the systematic murder of millions and built a veritable hell on Earth. It’d take a long time to detail the breadth and depth of his crimes, so on its face, observing Höss as a family man and watching the contented life he’s worked to give his family is a heinous proposition. The mundanity Glazer sticks to in detailing life at the Höss household, however, invites greater disquiet than had he turned his lens on the misery happening less than a stone’s throw away, because watching the matter-of-factness and dispassion of Höss and his wife Hedwig as they go about their day is chilling.
They discuss travel plans in bed before light’s out, and bicker over office politics. Höss dictates a memo warning SS officers to not over-pick the lilac bushes so as to not risk the beauty of the camp. He later calls a contractor agreeing to his proposal to build a more efficient incinerator as if he’s agreeing to the design of a new deck for his vacation home. Normalcy in the face of the unspeakable suggests a soul too foregone for redemption.
The Zone of Interest becomes haunting in its reticence. The horrors, while not untold, are not on gory display, but Glazer comes at it sideways. A quaint outing abruptly ends when a torrent of ash swirls downriver as Höss fishes and his youngest play in the water. The earth, as a metaphorical closet, cannot hold the skeletons in. Collective memory supplies the images, making the domestic ease of Höss’s family life all the more surreal to observe.
Frequent collaborator Mica Levi scores The Zone of Interest, or rather its key moments. A recurring motif is a thumbing growl resembling a warble from a monster’s throat. An overture and coda opens and closes the movie, both resembling a chorus of furies bearing down on you. To call it unsettling is an understatement, but it’s the closest thing to the feeling you’re left with watching The Zone of Interest unfold. Like screaming into the void, because there’s nothing else you can do.
Glazer can’t quite give in to despair, with some parts dedicated to the small acts of resistance possible in a world like this. They’re alienating, distorted sequences. Fit for depicting behavior that is truly alien to everything else, but as powerful these sequences are, they feel more like disorienting jolts than a thematic deepening.
The Zone of Interest is a novel approach to depicting modern history’s cruelest hour. A quiet horror and living nightmare in how it turns life upside down, and a perversification of what we hold dearest: a love between two people, children borne from that love, and a shared hope they’ll grow up in a better world than the one they were born into. To see it rendered back to you this way is enough to make you want to wretch.
Mikkel Frederiksen 