The Zone of Interest is a tough film. Most of us have very specific ideas of what Holocaust movies look like but British auteur Jonathan Glazer, whose last film – the mesmerizing Under the Skin – released a decade ago, eschews every single trope. There is no smidgen here of Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful. The Zone of Interest is an adaptation of Martin Amis’ 2014 novel but Glazer narrows the plot into focusing on only one of the narrators and fictionalizes the protagonist into the real-life SS officer Rudolf Hoss. Hoss was the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Zone of Interest refers to around 25 square miles surrounding Auschwitz in Poland.
Hoss, his wife Hedwig and five children live next to the camp. In several scenes, we see smoke billowing from the gas chambers where hundreds are being incinerated. Occasionally, we hear gunshots, guard dogs barking. But there is no visual of what’s happening inside the camp – we must imagine the horror which makes it even more frightening. Meanwhile, the family seems to be living in an alternate reality of everyday domesticity. There is a bucolic summer picnic, the commandant’s birthday, gossip and tea and a beautiful garden that Hedwig has created and is very proud of. Mass murder and an unimaginable scale of malevolence permeates the air they breathe but there is no acknowledgement or recognition. It is a distillation of what historian Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.”
Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who also shot Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, works mostly with wide shots in natural light. According to the film’s production notes, remotely operated cameras were embedded into the set (a reconstruction of the Hoss residence by production designer Chris Oddy). There were no film lights and as many as 10 cameras in different rooms were used at once allowing the actors to move as they wished.
The austerity and emotional distance of the form make what we see even more devastating. What’s happening beyond the wall barely registers. Hoss and his family could be any family, except that when he sits for a meeting with fellow officers, the conversation is about the optimal way to kill more Jews. In one scene, Hoss and his children are swimming, when Hoss realizes that the water also has the ashes of burned bodies. The children are immediately taken out and scrubbed clean.
Mica Levi’s music, a key component of Under the Skin, makes a similar impact here. The Zone of Interest is bone-chilling also because Glazer wants us to remember that what happened here was not an aberration. With the rise of fundamentalism and the politics of exclusion, the difference is perhaps of scale and degree – Hoss and his family, in denial and purposefully oblivious, could easily also be us. And that is the real horror.