The Zone of Interest is an urgent call to open our eyes to the human capacity for violence, hate, complicity, indifference and genocide. The Zone of Interest will be playing in cinemas nationwide starting February 2nd.
Writing about his family home in occupied Poland, SS Commandant Rudolf Höss said, “My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers.” But as the flowers bloomed and fruits and vegetables ripened, people were gassed, burnt, tortured and starved behind the garden wall. In that paradise of flowers, Höss, his wife Hedwig and their children, Klaus, Hans-Jürgen, Heidetraut, Inge-Brigitt, and Annegret, played, entertained and relaxed as the furnaces of Auschwitz spewed human ash into the air. Based on the Martin Amis novel, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a powerful and gutwrenching exploration of the complicity of indifference and the banality of mass murder.
Unlike many Holocaust dramas, The Zone of Interest never depicts the horrors of Auschwitz, instead relying on the power of suggestion through the disturbing sound design of Johnnie Burn. Here, domesticity is punctuated by the constant rumble of the furnaces, the sound of trains arriving, gunshots and the distant screams that float on the breeze.
As these sounds surround us, Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), casually dine on their terrace, read stories to their children, take boating trips on the nearby river, and entertain guests. They never comment on the horror behind the wall, the smell of burning, and the screams of suffering surrounding their daily lives in their “beautiful home.” In this house of horror, petrified local girls serve them and fulfil Höss’ sexual desires against their will while his eldest son counts his collection of gold teeth.
But while it may appear that the family has perfected their ability to live in their blood-soaked paradise, cracks are never far from the surface, as the bedrooms glow with the flames of the furnace chimneys and the distant screams invade the dreams of those who visit the house at night. Lukasz Zal’s wide shots never allow us to get too close to Höss and his family, yet an uncomfortable sense of claustrophobia threads through every scene. From casual conversations around the dinner table, while prisoners rush to clean Höss’ boots, to the ash that feeds Hedwig’s paradise of flowers, The Zone of Interest feels like a nightmare from which you can’t wake, one where everything appears banal yet terrifyingly skewed.
Many have pointed to Glazer’s ability to reflect “the banality of evil,” described by philosopher Hannah Arendt during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. In 1961, Arendt stated that Eichmann was “an ordinary, somewhat bland bureaucrat, who was neither perverted nor sadistic but terrifyingly normal.” The Zone of Interest reflects this normality, bureaucracy and indifference to stunning effect. The whole Höss family is complicit in the horror surrounding them, yet willingly oblivious to the nightmare they inhabit until faced with moments where their bubble of complicity and indifference is pierced, like the discovery of a jawbone in the river where the Höss children have been playing – an event that leads to each child being viciously scrubbed clean in the bathtub.
Many would like you to believe that the behaviours displayed in The Zone of Interest are consigned to history, but in reality, we know they are not, and that makes Glazer’s film even more powerful and horrifying. As he frees us from the nightmare of history, we are shown images of Auschwitz today as the corridors and chambers of the camp are cleaned for visitors. Over the years since the Holocaust, there have been numerous genocides from Rwanda to Cambodia and Bosnia. In each, the behaviours shown in Glazer’s film have played a part in the atrocities – neighbours have killed neighbours, while others went about their daily chores against a backdrop of screams and gunfire.
The Zone of Interest is an urgent call to open our eyes to the human capacity for violence, hate, complicity, indifference and genocide. The ideologies and human behaviours that fuelled the Holocaust and the countless genocides since are not consigned to history; they very much remain at large, from our willingness to turn away from world suffering to our desire to live in a perfect bubble of domesticity that ignores the people who are less fortunate on our doorstep. Many continue to blame others for our social ills, while politicians create scapegoats to cover their own incompetence and win votes.
Our world is not dissimilar to 1940, no matter how much we celebrate our progress. The Zone of Interest reminds us that the human behaviours displayed in the Höss house of horrors remain all too present in our modern world.
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