The Zone of Interest (2023): Staging Atrocity
Jonathan Glazer’s conceptual interpretation of one of mankind’s most horrifying atrocities is a biting condemnation of bystander apathy as a symptom of complicity.
The title card appears, four blinding white words against a black screen. A haunting overture plays as the letters bleed away, slowly, agonizingly, until we are left with the black screen. Minutes later, and still the darkness remains. The music envelopes us in an orchestral portal punctuated by sounds of nature, ferrying us into a different place, a different time.
The score fades and we are thrust into the scene of a family picnicking by a lake, surrounded by green. A mother, father, five children, and a dog relish in their new life in a new house with a lush garden, cobbled pathways, a pool in the backyard, and a glass greenhouse — an idyllic visage of paradise. The camera angle shifts and we notice a grey wall bordering the house with barbed wire and a heavily protected guard post some distance away. The father walks out, now dressed in a grey army uniform and black boots. This is a portrait of SS commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and his family, living cheek to cheek with the Auschwitz concentration camp in the year 1943.
The Zone of Interest is Glazer’s fourth entry into his surrealist and formalist oeuvre, consisting of only four feature films in a career spanning over two decades. Conceived in 2014, the film spent ten years in the making, characteristic of his increasingly lengthy and detail-oriented production process. Its genesis began from Martin Amis’s eponymous novel, which captivated Glazer for audaciously centering the perspective of a fictional Nazi concentration camp’s commandant.
Portraying the Holocaust from the point of view of its perpetrators, living ordinary lives amid administrative massacre of their participation, was a fascinating undertaking for Glazer. In early stages of research, he discovered that the camp commandant in Amis’s story was based on Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz’s extermination camp who lived just on the other side of the wall with his family. Though he had optioned the rights to the novel, Glazer’s adaptation soon swung in the direction of the real Höss family, taking sole inspiration from the book’s perpetrator perspective.
Glazer exhumes the atrocity of the Holocaust not through its violent manifestations, explicit in all manners of historical documentation and survivor testimony, including its many portrayals and interpretations in global cinema. In its lived normalization by Nazis is where his film is situated, a collection of ordinary occurrences — business meetings, garden parties, birthdays, playtime, pillow talk — existing in abject denial of the industrial genocide just over their wall. Life, for them, goes on. Glazer reimagines the optics of atrocity in which participation can look homely, banal, bureaucratic, and human.
In her 1961 reports of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and finding the convicted Nazi a shockingly unremarkable man, political philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with this very truth. She famously described this phenomenon as the “banality of evil,” the rationalization and justification of societal wrongdoing until introspection is no longer instinctive and ceases to be. So consumed by the vines of dissociating apathy and mundane normality, the family cannot, and will not, look over that wall. And so that is a view Glazer deliberately refuses to show, choosing to evoke imagery through allusion instead of depiction, and we are faced with what is essentially a banal family drama.
The work of evocation lies heavily on the shoulders of sound, the primary tool used to contradict and disrupt the Hösses’ paradise. This is what The Zone of Interest team calls “the second film,” a second layer that recontextualizes their ordinaty lives into a sickening illusion of reality. The genocide of six million victims is unseen yet blatantly heard through the sounds of screaming, yelling, crying, gunshots, train whistles, and blazing furnaces. This is the beast roaring relentlessly outside the Hösses’ door, day and night, with no reprieve. Sound designer Johnnie Burn spent years in research to configure the soundscape of Auschwitz, amassing a 600-page document and sound library to “accurately and respectfully represent what happened there.”
Get late to the movies’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
There is only one scene set inside the camp, a low angle shot of Rudolf’s profile against the white overcast sky as he oversees the prisoners. It is a jarring cut, for it is the one and only scene to utilize a close up in the film. With the wall removed, we are deposited into the dead center of “the zone of interest” — a nondescript name given to that region of Auschwitz so that SS officers could obscure the existence of their extermination camp — and the unimaginable horror of mass murder is no longer in our periphery. The camera does not pan or tilt down but simply holds Rudolf’s expression, impassive as though checking his daily mail, while screams and wails ring out around him, billowing in all directions with the smoke and ash. The chaos is a dark hole that speaks volumes in its visual absence, revealing just how much the perpetrators of atrocity can ignore to maintain their bourgeois fantasy.
Evocation finds another incarnation in Mica Levi’s chilling score. Initially planned for a 40-minute piece to be layered throughout, it was pared down to only 14 minutes condensed in the opening, closing, and infrared sequences that supplement the film with moments of purity and hope yet undercut with an echoing, impending doom. Levi’s finale is a horrifying composition of descending choral lines and synths gradually heightening in pitch against the jet black screen until the theater is filled with screams. These are the sounds of death knocking.
The notion of objectivity and historical accuracy is a constant point of reference in interviews with the filmmakers. Efforts were made to “remove the artifice and conventions of filmmaking” that risk aestheticizing the ordinary and exaggerating events for dramatic effect, to remove the voice of the filmmaker and avoid moralization through emotional manipulation. I appreciate Glazer’s creative innovations, but his claims about objective cinema feel unfounded for there is no scarcity of cinematic devices in the film: a desaturation of the image, center framing, overhead shots, fade-ins to black, white, and red, thermal photography, cross-cutting. The film is first and foremost a conceptual rendering of the atrocity of the Holocaust. The plot, though based in reality, is a fictionalized approximation of events. Its inspired choices and compositions are what make The Zone of Interest an experimental riot to behold, but have been undersold by the filmmakers for this trophy of documentary realism that the film simply is not. I understand what Glazer is trying to criticize about sensationalism in film, but find it disingenuous and misleading to profess the rejection of artifice when the art of filmmaking itself is artifice.
Where the film excels is in its dedication to authenticity, not objectivity. Glazer and his collaborators wanted to transport 1940s Nazi Germany into the current day, which meant accurately recreating physical locations and shooting the film digitally, under natural light, to achieve contemporaneity in the highest resolutions. To extend this immersive experience to the actors, Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal came up with the idea to capture their performances with multiple cameras and microphones planted strategically around the set, rolling concurrently. Unimpeded by conventional markers and the presence of the crew, who, within the Höss home, monitored the shots from the basement, the actors were given license to imbue their characters with more naturalistic performances. An element of omniscient surveillance always lurks, a technique they befittingly named “Big Brother in the Nazi House,” reinforced by the presence of the camp next door, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum where they shot on location. The exceedingly polished look of the film, appearing stark and alive to the modern eye, feeds further parallels to the film’s commentary on our treatment of atrocity in the modern era.
In the final and most surreal scene of the film, Rudolf stares directly into the camera as he is confronted with the consequences of his life’s work. It gives his pause, for the first time in his life. In his hollow expression, we see pride? Or could it possibly be regret? But the moment passes, and he turns on his heel, puts on his cap, and descends down a staircase into darkness. Life goes on.
This film is not about the Hösses, or Nazism, or the Holocaust. It is an allegory of our privilege and comfort in the compartmentalization and, by extension, tolerance of atrocity, especially when it is not happening to us. “I imagined myself at one point as a prisoner, imagining hearing the sound of the Höss children splashing and laughing in their swimming pool on the other side of the wall,” Glazer said in a THR interview. “The idea of the film became about that wall, about how that wall is a direct manifestation of how we ourselves as human beings compartmentalize the things we are happy to indulge in with the things — sometimes horrible things — we want to disassociate ourselves from.”
In adopting a conceptual lens, Glazer was able to use the atrocity of the Holocaust as a criterion for so many recurring instances of ignorance, apathy, and dissociation embedded in the fabric of our living history. The ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by Israelis, charged with the military and financial support of Western powers, is just one poignant example. As of March 3rd, 2024, at least 30,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and another 71,000 wounded from Israeli attacks since October 7th, 2023. Without a ceasefire in sight, this toll grows by the minute as the Israeli military continues to brutally target hospitals, refugee tents, and food delivery sites where Palestinians are most vulnerable, wiping out the population by bombing civilian neighborhoods and denying aid entry to the city. The Holocaust happened during a different time, but are the faces of atrocity that continue to plague our world so very different?
The film’s analogy does not equate the execution of war crimes to scrolling past posts about humanitarian crises on social media, nor does it attempt to diminish or trivialize genocide to a matter of abstract concept. The Zone of Interest ignites a gnawing discomfort of bystander complicity to watch apathy in motion, and opens up a conversation on the base level of cognitive dissonance we all practice in our lives. Glazer entrusts us with a question about what legacy we will choose to leave behind with what we have within our power to change. Silence is perpetration enough. Will their silence be our silence? Will their wall become our wall?
