The Zone of Interest
“Thank you for your Nationalist Socialist hospitality”
Jonathan Glazer took a very long time to make this film after 2013’s cosmic horror Under the Skin. He uses a similar documentary aesthetic to tell this story of a nazi family who lived next door to Auschwitz. Using transcripts & testimonies, Glazer adapted Martin Amis’s fictional novel into a recreation of the Höss family and their home, hiring actors Christian Friedel & Sandra Hüller. Production designer Chris Oddy & cinematographer Lukasz Zal recreated the ‘idyllic’ home, making it feel eerily fresh & modern. By injecting every scene with the sounds of grinding machinery & horrific screams, Glazer makes his audience reckon with the psychic pain of atrocity.
Friedel & Hüller, outspoken anti-fascists, did not take these roles lightly. Friedel saw this work as a kind of spiritual sequel to his first film, 2011’s The White Ribbon, while Hüller came on board once she understood Glazer’s intent. She told The Guardian “I realised it wasn’t actually about the Hösses. It was about people ignoring terrible things right where they live. A film to make us unsafe in the cinema.” The crux of the movie, that we do not see the actual violence, is what makes it such a painful experience. In every scene, we hear screams & gunshots while smoke billows in the background, enough so that the family on screen take note, but then move on with their day. As other humans in their orbit act out in small, notable ways, the Höss’s detachment is grotesque.
I got this visceral sense, thanks to an incredible sound design by Tarn Willers & Johnnie Burn, that these nazis, though they profess a love of nature, are locusts. They chew through the world as gluttonous, mindless consumers, using everything in their path. In the final act of this movie, Glazer brings the story into the present as a way of showing both the scope of their destruction as well as our continued detachment. Because these atrocities continue every day, nothing in this film is a relic of the past.
An interesting element in this film, to me at least, are all the casual mentions of labour. Hoss and his colleagues both recognize the need to maintain a workforce and want to murder as many people as possible. For all their talk of purity, they still need an underclass as a workforce. In their ‘perfect’ home, the Hosses do no labour. Their staff prepare their meals, tend to the garden, and care for the children. They are clearly terrified every momen, the death camp next door being an omnipresent threat, and yet they still rebel. I loved all the ways that Glazer incorporated these acts, from a nanny who drinks at night to the gardener who mixes ashes into the soil.
One of the most visceral moments for me were the night sequences, shot using a night vision camera (with the help of visual effects). A young girl sneaks into the work camp to hide apples for the workers, and finds a scrap of sheet music in the dirt. This girl was based on a 12-year old Polish resistance fighter who Glazer met while researching the film. Alexandra passed away before the film was completed, but that is her bike, her dress, in the film. And though these moments are there to inject light into the story, these references come with their own kind of darkness. The music she finds was written by Joseph Wulf, a historian who survived the camp and went on to publish multiple books about the nazi government. He settled into Berlin to document as much as he could, but in 1974 he jumped from his apartment window to his death. In a letter he left for his son, he wrote “I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”
Glazer may frame this story around a very specific holocaust, but the evil that perpetuated these acts still exists. So much of The Zone of Interest is about reckoning with a disconnect, forced upon all of us by a system too big for any one person to fight. And yet the fight still exists, the fight persists. There is no oppressor that can totally control their victims; rebellion is inevitable.
