Review: 'The Zone of Interest' Is The Most Important Movie Of The Year

By Jason Adams | Film | December 15, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | December 15, 2023 |

Thirty years after World War II ended, the Holocaust survivor and historian Joseph Wulf killed himself by jumping out of a fifth-floor window. He had tried for decades to get a Holocaust Museum built on the site of the Wansee Conference (which was where the Nazi’s “Final Solution” was decided) to no avail— at the time, Germany had no desire to memorialize the nightmare of its past. In Wulf’s last letter to his son before his suicide, Wulf wrote of his frustrations with the way the world was burying its head in the sand, saying:

“I have published 18 books about the Third Reich, and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”

That last sentence could be the logline for Jonathan Glazer’s deeply unsettling new film The Zone of Interest, which sharpens the terrible weight of that history down to a sick-making matter of inches—approximately the width of the cement wall that separates the happy home of Rudolph (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) and their five children from the grounds of the Auschwitz death camp circa 1942, where the commandant Rudolph heads out smiling every morning, kissing his wife on the cheek like a genocidal Ward Cleaver, to murder more millions of Jews.

Glazer’s film is set almost entirely on that beautiful green patch of land butting up against the camp’s walls where the Höss family reigns over their tidy domestic dramas. (A place that gives the film its title, as the Nazis euphemistically called that place “interessengebiet” meaning “Zone of Interest.”) Hedwig takes her visiting mother on a tour of the grounds, all buzzing with bees and beautiful flowers, and giggles when she admits she’s been nicknamed “The Queen of Auschwitz.” The children play, splashing about in a small square pool that’s been built for them under the looming windows of the workhouses just on the other side of the barbed wire—- a large shower head has been hoisted above it to keep the pool topped off, spraying the water that the Jews think they’re getting when the gas comes for them instead.

Little touches like that litter the film—the collective unconscious iconography of the Holocaust scattered about in corners and on windowsills that insinuate their ways into our brains like terrible static shocks. Hedwig trying on a beautiful fur coat she’s pulled out of a sack that was delivered to her front door by a camp internee pushing a wheelbarrow. Trying on the lipstick hidden in its pocket. Her children playing with gold teeth under their blankets at bedtime. Her mother’s face as she tries to sleep while being lit up by the hellish red light of a not-so-distant inferno.

When we first meet the Höss family they could be anybody as they frolic beside a river in the bucolic light of a beautiful afternoon. They pick berries, and they laugh, and they get into their cars subtly marked with SS license plates to drive home at the end of the day. It takes us awhile to realize just where their home is, who these people are. That is but for the soundtrack, immediately alerting us that something is off—opening on two minutes of black screen and the wailing Mica Levi score mixed with pastoral sounds of nature, Glazer’s film trains its audience from the start to listen. And then it never lets up.

As Hedwig and her husband and kids go about their daily routines, having banal conversations about birthdays, playing with their toy soldiers and boats, the film’s unrelenting industrial sound-design assaults us with the humming of ovens, with cut-off-too-quick shrieks and the occasional pop of a pistol. The Höss family doesn’t seem to even hear any of the noise surrounding them anymore—like cityfolk with the sounds of busses they have adapted. Watch as Hedwig bounces her sleepy infant on her knee, naming the flowers. Watch as the oldest son on horseback, dressed in his finest Hitler Youth browns, detects and names a specific birdsong all while we hear prisoners being beaten savagely just there on the other side of the reeds.

Far from liberating himself from representing the unrepresentable, and us from being forced to stare upon it, Glazer trusts in our brains to do the hard labor—giving us just enough noose to hang ourselves with, The Zone of Interest makes us all complicit, forcing its viewers to be active participants in the horrible story’s telling. He and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Cold War, I’m Thinking of Ending Things) filmed their actors with remote cameras, observing them always from a distance, and we become compelled to make meaning from the meaningless horror of it all. We walk out at film’s end with our hands covered in ash, our throats coated in bile, our participation stained purposefully upon us.

Further visual abstractions interrupt the proceedings here and there, ones that also force the viewer into active mode. The screen bleeds a full bold red at one point. And there are occasional night-time interludes, all filmed in the starkest black-and-white by a thermal camera, where a young girl wanders among the ditches and work grounds planting apples behind shovels, in the dirt. Who is she? Is this really happening? Or are these visions actually the Nazi family’s nightmares, where hope and love can still find its way?

I didn’t summon up the tragic story of the historian Joseph Wulf at this review’s start for no reason—The Zone of Interest summons the man up itself by showing this young girl find a piece of music called “Sunbeams” tucked beneath one of those shovels; a piece of music that Wulf was known to have written while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz. We watch the girl go home and play the song on her piano while subtitles of words unspoken show us Wulf’s lament of defiance and rememberance.

After the war had ended and Rudolph Höss was put on trial for his crimes—when directly accused of killing three and a half million Jews in his role as the longest-serving commandant at Auschwitz he replied, “No, only two and one half million.” Höss also wrote a final letter to his son before his death. Having re-found his religion and been given the Holy Communion before being hanged, Höss told his son:

“Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and judge for yourself responsibly. In all your undertakings, don’t just let your mind speak, but listen above all to the voice in your heart.”

Glazer’s The Zone of Interest presses its ear as hard as it can against the chest of humanity, and all it hears are echoing chasms of horror reverberating up, like belching furnaces, through time. This film, an immolation of indifference, stares wild at our ability to stare at the flowers while the ground behind us is splitting open, staggered. At Nuremberg, Höss called himself “a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine”—The Zone of Interest strips us of all our skin and all our defenses, seeing that machine churning and screaming as hard at work as ever inside each and every one of us today. What a moment for this movie to arrive—more prescient than its makers could have imagined and more vital than ever.