Review: 'The Zone of Interest' Radically Upends the Idea of a Holocaust Movie

If silence is violence, then I’d deem Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest the most brutal film in theaters today. Emotionlessly presenting a daily report on one of Führer und Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler’s most loyal soldiers, the film quietly explores its nightmarish concept with zero frills. There’s no blatant depiction of the monstrosities occurring in the immediate vicinity. They’re unspeakable, and they go unspoken. Instead, smokestacks billow black soot into a cloudy blue sky while little ones splash in a pool. Groundskeepers till fine gray ash into the soil of a blooming garden. Gunfire and screams pierce the air surrounding an otherwise serene picnic by the water. This is life just outside the confines of Auschwitz in its simplest — and most revolting — form.

Nazi Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is a commandant at the German Reich’s enormous complex of more than 40 concentration and extermination camps. Located within occupied Poland, the compound played a central role in the systematic implementation of the Holocaust throughout World War II. On a smaller scale, Höss plays a key part in Auschwitz’s day-to-day along with a battalion of other Nazis. Signing off on proposed expansions, discussing the finer details of a soon-to-be-built crematorium, overseeing disciplinary actions for insubordinate Standartenführer personnel … the epitome of evil, all in a day’s work.

Home is hardly an escape for Höss, so I can’t imagine the pathetic “just following orders” excuse for the atrocities committed holding any actual weight here. With only a wall between his workplace and his household, there certainly can’t be any compartmentalizing going on. His wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) looks after the greenhouse while a horrific soundscape echoes from next door. His children play with knick-knacks torn from the hands of kids their same age imprisoned not far from their window. The family swims in the same river where body parts wash ashore. No vertical concrete slab with barbed-wire trim can block out this reality.

Still, Rudolf and Hedwig would say they’re living the dream. Husband is successfully climbing the career ladder, wife is aptly rearing the littles, the staff of servants keeps the interior and exterior of the house looking tip-top…It’s everything they hoped and dreamed for, dating back to the earliest pages of their ongoing love story and unfolding exactly as planned. But, when a surprise promotion — one that would relocate Rudolf to Berlin and crown him deputy inspector of every concentration camp, not just Auschwitz — threatens the plans they’d made together, the cracks in the facade begin to show. The Hösses can pretend not to see the ugliness in plain sight, but it’s been obvious to us observers from the start.

If you — like me — are a fan of (or, at the very least, familiar with) Glazer’s last film, 2013’s Under the Skin, then you might assume you know what to expect going into The Zone of Interest. While bearing no similarities in plot, Under the Skin nevertheless approaches its starkly terrifying material with ostensibly flat direction. No fancy camera movements, no twisty-turny narratives, no lavish sets, no extravagant performances gunning for an Academy Award sizzle reel. To a certain extent, this does accurately describe both films. However, The Zone of Interest takes Glazer’s distinct approach a step further by eliminating some of the more stylized elements of the former film for an even more grounded effort. (The only true slips out of the real world and into the void come in the form of brief digressions shown in an unsettling black and white negative.)

Hüller’s performance in The Zone of Interest also took me back to Under the Skin. Whereas in that film Scarlett Johansson’s alien character (Laura, as she’s named in the script but never explicitly called on-screen) searches for human traits to adopt so she can better blend in with us mortals, Hüller’s Hedwig has suppressed the same human traits that would prevent her from accepting existence under Nazism. She is the inverted version of Laura, a black and white negative who has shed those basic human traits to become the compliant, complicit spouse of a high-ranking Nazi. 

It’s a question worth asking: How (not to mention why) do you make an emotionless, even-keeled movie about such unfathomable real-life horrors of the not-too-distant past with troubling current-day resonance? The cinematography by Łukasz Żal and score by Mica Levi are essential factors in Jonathan Glazer’s complicated equation. Żal’s pragmatic digital shots show the full picture — the Höss family in the foreground, the manmade barrier in the middle ground and Auschwitz just beyond in the background. Meanwhile, the inimitable Levi delivers an uncharacteristically pared-down but nonetheless fitting soundtrack. There’s no romanticization, no glorification. Only vérité.

From its naturalistic dialogue to its relatively plotless proceedings, its observational interludes to its unemotional portrayal of life in and around concentration camps, The Zone of Interest dares to challenge the premise of a “Holocaust movie” as we’ve come to understand them over the years. Placed alongside Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Inglorious Basterds — all contemporary titles that spend a lot of time from the SS perspective — The Zone of Interest is clearly a radical departure. Once it arrives at its subversive, medium-bending conclusion, it’s already cemented its status as one of the toughest, most difficult historical dramas of its era — and one of the most distinctive works of the decade so far.