The Zone of Interest

Certainly a theatrical must-see. There’s just no way your living room TV and sound system can impart the same experience.

The film is undeniably horrifying and haunting. Initially, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it.

When I was a senior in high school, I went with my friend to visit her family in Ulm, Germany (they are all Russian Jews). We visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial.  At Dachau, our tour guide told us that people often wondered how the residents in the town did not know what was happening within the walls of the camp. They did, she said, they saw them unloaded from trains and heard the screams. Dachau was a work camp that was originally built for political dissidents, and while 1/5 (>40,000 people) of its prisoners perished within it, the gas chambers that were built were used to murder what was estimated to be less than 100 people. 

The Zone of Interest posits us just outside the walls of Auschwitz, and centers a fictional character who is the architect of all its suffering. Rudolf Höss is the man who turns theory into practice, residing with his wife who giddily laughs at being called “the Queen of Auschwitz." The systematic, industrialized extermination is not depicted, but its evidence is found everywhere. My expectation of horror, partially informed by what my tour guide said, was met and exceeded.

I think it’s easy to critique this film as being another Nazis are bad, no shit movie. By easy, of course, I mean lazy. It’s also easy to point out what plenty of people do realize—that the Nazis were not comically evil. In actions, they were, of course, irredeemable, but personality, inner life, goals, loves, dreams… They were real, and they were often not overtly anti-Semitic or nationalistic. To live off the land and have a happy and healthy family—it’s simplistic, nearly wholesome. The genocide, of course, the lebensraum and the belief in superiority, was what undergirded everything, and the antisemitism and nationalism were an intentional part of the equation.

The Zone of Interest works as a mirror to our own lives. It’s now cliché to say that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, but it remains true. When I saw the movie, I was wearing a sweater my mom bought me for Christmas. I try to thrift all of my clothes, and something like a sweater is very easy to find and likely higher quality if vintage. I didn’t hate the pattern or the fit though, and keeping it was less of a hassle than getting into it with my mom (I’ve asked her not to buy me clothes, but I still get some every year). The label on my sweater says it was made in China. That’s partially true, but it probably crossed five or more borders before ending up at my local Macy’s. It’s polyester, so there was an oil deposit somewhere, the crude oil was processed into various chemicals that eventually became plastic, and so on. The plastic would be woven, dyed, assembled, and packaged. Each step was undoubtedly performed at the absolute cheapest financial cost without regard to the environmental and human price. 

Now, buying a sweater is not the same as willfully, and at times gleefully, conducting a genocide. Getting a latte at Starbucks is not the same as planning out concentration camps and trying to engineer the crematoriums to work more efficiently. More relevant, perhaps, is the girl I went to high school with who works for Raytheon. She goes on a few extravagant vacations a year to beautiful tropical destinations or famous cultural sites. What that evokes is a lot more similar to the goings-on of The Zone of Interest. Using your blood money to soak up the sun in Cancun is comparatively only a few steps removed from eagerly trying on a fur coat taken from a deported Jew or counting up gold teeth torn from their gums. It just is, and I experienced the same distaste watching Sandra Hüller flounce around that I feel seeing her Instagram posts.

The Zone of Interest successfully bludgeons its audience with abomination after abomination. You cannot walk out of this movie unmoved or undisturbed (that is not a challenge, edgelords). That being said, I’m not sure I can quite make sense of some of the technical choices made by Jonathan Glazer. I’m not even saying they didn’t work, I just don’t necessarily understand their why and how. I am not someone who enjoyed Under the Skin; for me, it was one of those movies that I would label as “good” but was so unable to connect with that I really did not enjoy it. But Emily, you dummy, you may say, it’s about an alien, so that’s exactly the point. Alright, like I said, I think it was a proficient film. 

From what I recall, Glazer pulls out some of the same tricks for The Zone of Interest. The blank screens, the non-diegetic, sonic warping—it’s all so jarring. Bright scarlet and an alarm-like blare expose your senses to a raw horror totally separate from the produced and false sets of a movie. When watching, you are disgusted by the Nazis, and even though you know their crimes were wrought in real history, you know they are actors. The abrasive sound and the blank screen taps into something innate within you. It’s a feeling that’s deeper, some type of malevolence that exists below your consciousness. The harsh sounds are distinguished from those of the film, which is quite the feat. The Zone of Interest is littered with the sounds of screams and gunshots—the sounds of mechanized murder. To set sounds apart from that and to achieve a deeper level of disturbing is a success in filmmaking.

Here, I think I have made some sense of this creative choice. Glazer may be trying to connect that stirred revulsion within us to something innate about the Nazis, or rather, ourselves. I think that, as humans, we are all capable of what I would term unimaginable cruelty, but, for the vast majority of people, that sort of impulse lies below the subconscious. There’s a Vampire Weekend song “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin” that has the lyrics “So let them win the battle / But don't let them restart / That genocidal feeling / That beats in every heart.” This speaks to my belief that it’s a latent instinct that can be triggered into coming to the surface. When it arises and actions reflect it, it is justified and intentional in that sense. The lyrics imply that the feeling can be acknowledged and dispelled. I think this is an optimistic view of things, and that the tendency to cruelty is so dormant and disconnected from our daily lives that for most, this recognition is functionally impossible.

The other Glazer-ism I don’t get: the infrared-esque scenes with the girl dropping fruit where the prisoners can presumably find it to eat. Both of these scenes occur as Rudolf reads his wandering daughter a fairytale (one of them is Hansel and Gretel—certainly not a coincidence). Those good old Brothers Grimm stories skew dark and have a rather black and white picture of the world—obvious good tussling with clear-cut evil. The irony must be intentional. The effects and the overlay that is totally different from the rest of the film is what I don’t get. It cuts out when the girl returns home. Are these scenes meant to be within the camp? That would be an easy explanation, but when I first saw it, I thought she was attending labor sites outside the walls. How would she have gotten within the camp? I don’t think this is the explanation.

Is there something about the infrared that exposes some truth? Any human being would look the same under it—Jewish prisoner and Auschwitz commandant alike. I don’t think that’s the point of the movie or informs any theme or feelings though, and no one but the girl is ever shown. It could be just that it's meant to set the helpful girl far apart from her murderous neighbors, but I’m not sure that’s it. 

While writing, I abandoned this project of trying to figure it out and found a Vanity Fair interview with Glazer and DP Łukas Żal to inform me. I was very close, Glazer says that the girl is based off of a real person and that “the aesthetic follows the fundamentals of it—there’s something very beautiful and poetic about the fact that it is heat, and she does glow. It reinforces the idea of her as an energy.” He says that “It was the simple, pure goodness in her that made me feel like I could carry on with this project because there was an opposition to this dark force. There was an energy that was human; we also have the capacity for goodness.” I don’t know that I understood or felt that while watching the film, maybe partially because I associate the thermal image with the coldness of an investigation or attack, which I realize is somewhat ironic due to the fact that the technology highlights heat. I feel somewhat validated reading that they used military tech for these shots, though. 

During my tour at Dachau, our guide also told us a much more personal story. She was a white German whose grandfather had fought in the war. As she told it, her mother had always told her—and apparently deeply believed, likely for her own psychological safety—that her grandfather was a soldier fighting for his country without choice, not a Nazi. Researching her family, the tour guide uncovered that her grandfather had applied multiple times to join the SS. She did not reveal this to her mother and let her die without knowing the truth. I think this story cuts to the heart of The Zone of Interest. Those that perpetuated these crimes against humanity lived normal lives, and, except for those prosecuted at Nuremberg, went back to them and pushed their evils back down inside of them. Their genocidal nature returned to dormancy.

After all that—The Zone of Interest is a movie that goes beyond the present moment. It serves as a memorial to the Holocaust and its horrors, still resonates today, and probably will forever. Not that timeliness is key to its effectiveness; the film can stand on its own. What really sealed the deal for the impact of the film on me was the very end, as Rudolf descends stairs and retches, and we are shown a different banality—the reality of what remains. The stacks of shoes, the clothes, the cleaning staff who work everyday to preserve such a horrific chapter in human history at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial. I’m not sure if we are to understand that, in his sickness, Rudolph sees these visions. I like to think of it that way, that he is stricken with knowledge of the end, of the regime’s fall and his loss of everything he worked for. It is a bit of placation for me—he would suffer with that revelation. Regardless, it works as one last reminder and an acknowledgement of the victims. It’s plain imagery that is nonetheless incredibly moving, keeping the aesthetic and pace of the rest of the film but featuring the present and centering what remains of the martyrs. They were normal people too.