The Silent, Shrieking Horror of THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Jonathan Cornford, Sat 24th February 2024

*This article contains spoilers for The Zone of Interest and openly addresses the topic of the Holocaust*

Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, opens with a seemingly intentional confrontation to the audience, especially to those not familiar with the once commonplace pre-film overture. In asking the audience to spend almost five minutes looking at a black screen before the film actually starts, it seems to be actively and willingly testing the viewers’ patience. But what this bold choice in opening does is actually something more than simply asking the audience to appreciate the haunting musical score by Mica Levi. 

It is telling the audience to do two things, both of which are vital to both the experience of watching the film itself, and the central idea that Glazer is hoping to leave an audience chewing over as the lights come up. 

The first: listen. The film’s great power largely arrives with each individual audience member as they enter the cinema, relying on implication through sound. None of the horrors are explicitly on screen; they are all reliant on knowledge that the audience member holds, prompted through sound. 

And second: don’t look away. The film is a study of people who are experts at being able to look away and ignore the things that are taking place in front of their very eyes, and the film challenges us not to do the same thing. Mirroring the film’s devastating final shot, Glazer opens his film by asking us to gaze into complete and utter darkness, guided only by sounds that unsettle loose fragments of thought in our heads. 

The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glazer’s fourth feature film, and his first since 2013’s remarkable science fiction gem Under the Skin. In so rarely working in the medium of feature filmmaking, Glazer has certainly conditioned me to come to expect something urgent and vital when he does return to our cinemas. The Zone of Interest is no exception, and is his greatest achievement so far. 

Loosely based on Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, it follows the true story of Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), an Auschwitz commandant in the Second World War, and his family who live in the literal shadow of the Auschwitz concentration camps. His wife Hedwig (the remarkable Sandra Hüller) just wants to raise their children in the perfect home, and goes out of her way to curate the ideal environment for them. They eat dinners together, they swim in their backyard pool, they have an extensive garden with lots of outdoor space, they go swimming in the river; their lives are, by every measure except one, normal. 

Rudolf takes part in this idyllic family unit, being the best father that he can be. He reads bedtime stories to his children. He takes them out paddling on the river. He works hard to provide for his family. And every day we see him go off to work, leaving Hedwig and her children to go about their lives. 

It is in this portrayal of mundane, everyday life that the film outlines its main thesis. In many ways we are actually experiencing two films; the film we see on screen as Hedwig goes about her domestic duties and the children experience life, and the film that we hear on the other side of the walls. In many ways, the film taking place off screen is the film, and yet we only catch cursory glimpses of it, instead mostly asked to construct it in our own minds with the prompting of incredibly disturbing and vivid soundscapes. While we watch Hedwig nurture and love her children in an Eden-like home filled with plants and grass, we hear the sounds of gunshots, shouting, bloodcurdling screams, all underpinned by a constant pedal tone of the unceasing fires, chimneystacks and gas chambers of the unquenchable war machine. 

Many of the scenes in the home were achieved in a similar way to that of reality TV shows like Big Brother, with Glazer and his crew placing up to ten cameras around the home and a range of different microphones to capture a vérité - almost documentary-like - depiction of home life in real time with minimal crew on set. The result is alarming; this family seem genuinely happy and settled in this home in a way that is undeniably authentic, which only further underlines the horror. Not just the horror that is taking place literally next door, but the horror of the indifference and wilful ignorance that they have decided to bathe in for the sake of their own peace of mind. 

There are moments that threaten to burst the bubble that the Höss family have so meticulously curated in the shadow of carnage. Rudolf takes his children swimming in the river, only to discover that the ashen remains of exterminated Jews are being disposed of upstream, seemingly more to Rudolf’s inconvenience than disgust. The Polish servant has to wash blood off of Rudolf’s boots after he comes home from work. Rudolf’s daughter is kept awake at night by the smell of the smokestacks and the ever present glow of the incinerators. Occasionally the sounds from over the wall become too loud to ignore. But for the most part, the unspeakable things happening barely on the periphery of their lives have been accepted simply as normality; an unavoidable byproduct of the perfect lives that they have managed to find themselves. 

Hedwig and her friends treat going through discarded clothing from the camps as a shopping trip - she even borrows the lipstick that she finds in one of the pockets of a fur coat that not the day before belonged to a human being extinguished on the other side of the wall. The son plays with teeth that he found in the field in bed by torchlight, as one might read or play with a toy after they have been told by their parents to go to sleep. It is only Hedwig’s mother is the only person who seems to still be in control of the mechanics and limits of her moral judgement; after a few nights she is unable to take it anymore and leaves. Upon her arrival she is shocked and deeply upset by the immediate proximity of the death and carnage, but when she doubles back and clarifies with Hedwig that the walls to their garden are indeed also the wall separating them from the death camps, Hedwig simply dismisses it with a confirmation and an explanation of how she hopes her tomatoes and vines will come to adorn the wall in the coming years. 

The smells, the sounds, and the soft glow of the fires at night are too much for her, and she leaves. On some level I actually feel like the film is asking a similar question of its audience; when is it too much for you? Both on a literal level, asking us to put ourselves in the shoes of these real life historical figures, but also in the sense of the fact that we are being asked to watch a film about the worst thing that has ever happened. When is it too much? When does your conscience step in and ask you to leave? Certainly for a couple of people a few rows in front of me in the cinema, they found the answer to that question, and they got up and left. Again, though, the only horrors that are to be found in The Zone of Interest are the ones that we carry into the cinema with us. 

In stark contrast to the naturalistic, docudrama form of the majority of the film, there are a small handful of moments that take the film into some sort of storybook, fantasy world. On both occasions this occurs while Rudolf is sitting with his children in bed, reading to them from a storybook. We watch as a young girl, in startling thermal vision, walks through the countryside, leaving apples for the Jews to find. 

What the importance of these sequences is, and why they are presented in such a jarring way compared to the rest of the film, is entirely up to the audience. There are, of course, meanings that can be ascribed to the filmmakers. One such explanation, for instance, is simply down to the fact that the entirety of the film was shot using natural light, something that Glazer wanted to continue with even in these night sequences. So instead of filming those night sequences with film lighting, they instead shot it with thermal cameras, giving those scenes an otherworldly, almost fantasy quality (something that definitely aligns with these scenes’ adjacency to Rudolf reading bed time stories to his kids). 

What that doesn’t ascribe, however, is how these scenes are to make you feel. For me it immediately evoked a feeling that we were watching what was probably the only act of human decency and empathy being portrayed in the film. It exists in such deep contrast to the rest of the film that the film itself inverts, showing us these acts of defiant kindness and goodness in black and white negative. It also renders the small girl a bringer of light, literally taking on a form of brightness and light as she traverses through the darkness of the Holocaust, leaving small tokens of light and life hidden amongst the shit and filth of what life around her has become. 

This young girl was included in the film when Glazer met with a 90 year old woman named Alexandra who was still living in Poland at the time, and had worked with a resistance movement called the AK, a sort of Polish underground. Because children were not as conspicuous as other Polish adults, they would cycle around construction sites at night leaving food for the Jews. In doing so, they would also run documents and share information in and out of the camps. In meeting with and hearing the story of this Polish, non-Jewish woman who did what she could at a time when it could have cost her life, he was compelled to include it in the film as a singular piece of light in contrast to the unspeakable and almost overwhelming darkness of the film. 

It is one of the most heartbreaking moments of the film, then, when we hear the sounds of two Jews being drowned in the river for fighting over food, likely an apple that was left out by this young girl. 

In painting such a vivid soundscape, both through sparse score and masterful sound design, we are assaulted by the same sounds of carnage as the Höss family. One of the biggest and most disturbing triumphs of the film is how this sound design almost starts to have the same effect on us as it does its characters; it becomes normal. We begin to get used to it. Or perhaps, in an effort to protect our own moral selves, we begin to drown it out or ignore it. Which is precisely what this film is about. The ability that we have as humans not for unspeakable evil, but actually the willingness that we have to ignore, compartmentalise and block out unspeakable evil and still tell ourselves that we are inherently good. 

By the time the film reaches its final stretch, we begin to see more of what makes Rudolf tick; we see not just the loving, caring father who comes home from work and looks after his children, but also the man who has the capacity to ride a horse into Auschwitz and commit genocide. It is implied that he rapes a young Jewish woman, the twisted and horrific irony underlined by us then watching him meticulously wash his penis afterwards. For one brief, almost unbearable moment, we follow him into the concentration camp. We don’t see anything, of course, but we instead watch his cold, uncaring face as the sounds that were previously and mercifully on the other side of a wall are foregrounded. This may be one of the most disturbing and unsettling scenes in cinema in the last ten years. We see him callously and clinically consult with other Nazi members about upgrading their “crematoriums” to be able to exterminate more efficiently and with greater numbers. He is promoted to a position of authority and management in the transportation and extermination of over 700,000 Hungarian Jews, and the first thing he does is call his wife to let her know the good news. He later also calls his wife while he is at a celebratory party with other higher up members of the Nazi party, telling her that it is difficult for him to enjoy himself when all he can really think about is how difficult it would be to gas everybody in the room with such high ceilings. 

In the final moments of the film we are asked to really consider not just the character of Rudolf Höss in this film, but him as a historical figure, and his place in the history of the Holocaust. As he descends a number of staircases, he pauses, before retching. A number of times. Is his body keeping track of the atrocities that he refuses to acknowledge as such in his mind? Is it simply from proximity to so much poisonous gas and constant death? Is he trying to throw up?

Before we have a moment to make up our minds, the film cuts to present day Auschwitz, as workers clean up the museum at the end of the day. As we watch them sweep the floors and wipe down the glass surfaces, we see the clothes. The shoes. The reminder of just to what scale this atrocity occurred. For just long enough that it becomes uncomfortable. And then a little longer. 

When we cut back to Rudolf in the stairwell, he is positioned so as to be able to walk back up the stairwell into the light, or to continue downstairs into the darkness. It is such a simple piece of filmmaking from Glazer that it works at such a primal, gut level. We of course know with the fullness of retrospect what the moral thing is. The suggestion that the film makes in this moment is that Rudolf also is fully aware of the moral sewer he has found himself in. And yet he still has the choice. 

The film ends, and we watch as he descends into the darkness. 

Höss testified at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on 15 April 1946, where he gave a detailed accounting of his crimes. On 25 May 1946, he was handed over to the Polish authorities and tried for murder. His trial lasted from 11 to 29 March 1947, at the end of which he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out next to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz concentration camp.

There are many that would ask as to the purpose of depicting people and events like these on screen at all, and certainly every time that a new film is released that explores the Holocaust there are people asking that same question. In the case of The Zone of Interest, I think that the answer to that is two-fold. 

Firstly, I don’t think that we are even close to being able to say that we have exhausted our need to be reminded of the Holocaust through the medium of cinema. Especially in the political and societal climate that we find ourselves in today, I think that it is still incredibly important that we remember these events and reflect on them. The Holocaust is still recent history, and the effects of World War II and Nazism are still rippling through our culture today. As such, I do think that there is a need and a space to be filled in cinema for stories of this nature that remind us of where we have come from and the mess that we are still living in as a result. 

But secondly, I think this is a film about so much more than just the Holocaust. The reason this film is as disturbing and urgent as it is, is because it addresses something that is present for all of us. It addresses something that is a constant for human beings, and a reality that we must all confront and deal with at some point in our respective lives, lest we dispassionately succumb to the unspeakable alternative. Many, myself included, have referred to this film as being about the “banality of evil.” That is true, but it is about more than that. It is, as Mark Kermode so eloquently put it in his review of the film on Kermode and Mayo’s Take, about the “screaming, silent horror of indifference.” It is about the fact that all of us are not only willing to ignore injustice, but actively do so on a daily basis if it means that we are able to sleep at night with our constructed lives intact. It doesn’t take long to think of a whole list of things that are wrong with the world we live in, and to identify evil and injustice happening on our doorstep. The Zone of Interest isn’t just about the Holocaust - it’s about us. 

It isn’t a film that you watch to enjoy by any traditional or popular definitions of that idea. But it is scorchingly present and viscerally truthful in a way that you will find yourself having to actively not look away from. Films like The Zone of Interest don’t come around very often, and when they do it is important to let them resonate in your heart. It will not be comfortable. It could very well hurt. And it will definitely open your eyes to some of the complex, dark truths inherent in your place on this Earth. 

Will you continue to look away? It might seem like it’s easier not to confront the truths over your back wall, but no matter how intently you look away, you can’t block out the sounds. 

Listen. And don’t look away.

The Zone of Interest is nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Sound.