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The Zone of Interest breaks dangerous new ground in exploring the Holocaust
14.12.2023 - 18:19 / polygon.com
The Zone of Interest, the new film from Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer, is one of 2023’s most difficult films. It’s also one of its best and most essential. The film seems implicitly obsessed with the question of what it really meant to be complicit in the worst crimes of the Nazi war machine. The effect, if you can stomach it, is a film that depicts the evils at the heart of the Holocaust as clearly and plainly as any movie ever has.
The Zone of Interest is set mere feet from the walls of Auschwitz, at the home of commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family. The movie focuses on how they build their life on their small estate, with its fancy house and Mrs. Höss’ (Sandra Hüller) carefully curated garden. Meanwhile, the walls of the concentration camp, with its horrible sounds and billowing smoke, are close behind them.
This is a decidedly different kind of Holocaust movie than almost any ever made. Glazer’s camera never goes inside the camp, or shows the prisoners huddled there, or observes their actual fates. Rudolf makes a point of taking his boots off outside and letting a maid wash the blood off them, rather than tracking it inside his home.
This approach may sound like it sidelines the tragedy and horror of the Holocaust, centering the story on the culprits rather than the victims. And it’s true that Glazer’s film relies heavily on extratextual knowledge and awareness to carry viewers’ understanding of the events actually seen on screen. But Glazer’s carefully measured detachment lets the situation speak for itself. The knowledge that the audience carries about the Holocaust gives meaning to the things we don’t see play out. It’s a difficult and arguably dangerous approach, but Glazer handles it with care, never letting viewers forget what’s happening nearby.
The atrocities of the Holocaust surround the film, just like they surround the family. We don’t see the camp, but the sounds of it are all-encompassing, blaring just beneath the everyday sounds in the rest of the movie. They’re like a thick fog that permeates the family’s weightless domestic concerns, making the evil they’re complicit in inescapable. Death and its noises are ever-present but never acknowledged, shrouding the nearly meaningless events on the screen.
The whir and drone of machinery underscores some of the film’s quietest moments of dialogue, while gunshots and screams punctuate and underscore characters’ conversations. Those sounds are never used to emphasize individual events in the characters’ lives; they’re entirely unrelated. At one point, when Rudolf’s wife is trying out a new lipstick, found inside the pocket of a new fur coat delivered to her straight from the camp, we hear the sound of
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