Written by: Grant Lefelar
On April 11, 1947, five days before his execution, Rudolf Höss, the infamous SS commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, wrote farewell letters to his family from his Polish prison cell.
To his wife Hedwig, Höss penned, “Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle. But I have again found my faith in my God.”
Following Nazi Germany’s collapse, many of Hitler’s war criminal followers conveniently attempted to prove their humanity by denouncing their past crimes. Höss was no exception to this trend. His parting message forcefully repents for his misdeeds — misdeeds that contributed to the deaths of millions — while arguing for his newfound sense of virtue.
However, director Jonathan Glazer, the British auteur responsible for past cinematic triumphs such as Sexy Beast and Birth, simply retorts, “Why did their humanity retreat as they perpetrated history’s largest organized mass killing?” in his latest feature The Zone of Interest.
Set in the closing years of the Second World War as the Nazis attempted to conquer Eastern Europe in pursuit of Lebensraum expansionism for the German people, The Zone of Interest forensically follows the personal lives of Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family while living and working in German-occupied Poland.
Loosely based on Martin Amis’ novel of the same title, The Zone of Interest is a new kind of Holocaust film. Rather than showing the horror of Nazi concentration camps in unflinching detail, Glazer puts the genocide of Jews and other groups in the background rather than the foreground. While set in Auschwitz, the story’s action is found not within the camp’s walls but immediately outside in the confines of the Höss family residence.
At the Höss home, Rudolf spends quality time with his wife and children while not working. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tends to the property’s kitchen and gardens while striving to keep her husband and five children happy. The children frolic in their backyard, play with the offspring of other SS guards, and swim in the nearby Soła river. It is an idyllic dream home complete with all the conveniences of early 1940s modernity; a place to raise a family and enjoy life’s blessings.
Yet, under the facade of upper-middle-class normality lies terror after terror after terror. Jewish female servants staff the Höss’ home, fearfully standing at Hedwig’s beck and call night and day. As the family relishes warm summer days in the garden, shots, screams, train whistles, and burning fires soundtrack the environment like cricket and bird chirps. At night, one of the older boys fiddles with the golden teeth of murdered inmates from the comfort of his top bunk, investigating under his sheets with a flashlight.
In their pursuit of a comfortable life, Rudolf directly perpetuates the atrocities next door as his family remains willfully ignorant. Their lives are a tale of heaven and hell separated by a concrete and brick wall lining the residence and the camp.
When the two sectors mix, chaos abounds. As Rudolf swims with two of his younger children in the Soła, SS guards upstream release a plume of human ash and bone into the river, which the trio is unable to escape. After returning home, Hedwig drenches the children in a bathtub with scorching water, scrubbing out every follicle.
When Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge) arrives for a visit, she is immediately disturbed by the sights coming from outside her bedroom window. Without a word, she departs in the cover of night, unable to deal with the realities of her daughter’s life.
There is room for only one zone of interest in the Höss’ world. When the other unspeakable one becomes evident to them, they panic.
Meanwhile, Rudolf’s superiors order him to Berlin to organize the transportation and extermination of Jews from Hungary. Hedwig, unwilling to leave behind her life in Auschwitz, pleads for her and the children to stay behind. Despite being adjacent to the site of humanity’s worst crimes, she demands to remain.
In his depiction of the Hösses and the Holocaust, director Glazer does not opt for style over substance. In previous films on the subject, notably Steven Speilberg’s Schindler’s List, the pure horror of the Holocaust is accented with symbolic visuals such as a little girl in a red coat, moody black and white, and dreary orchestral music.
Zone partially does the opposite. When following the Hösses, Glazer showcases the family in full living color surrounded by the horrendous cacophony emerging over the camp’s walls. The filmmaker exhibits the routine of the Höss’ universe matter-of-factly and plainly.
Glazer’s decision to limit concentration camps to the horizon has predictably earned some scorn. The New York Times’ chief film critic Manohla Dargis lambasted Glazer for presenting the Holocaust as “background noise.” However, this background noise is the film’s point. The Holocaust was an abomination committed by seemingly ordinary individuals who killed millions in their pursuit of a depraved vision. As they raised their children, cooked meals, and picked flowers, they did the unimaginable. Glazer is not lessening the Holocaust by displaying it in a no-frills manner. Instead, he expresses how the indescribable can blend into the distance and not force a second glance from its culprits.
Glazer makes an exception in the film’s style when weaving short segments of a young Polish girl who avoids SS soldiers to hide pears and apples in Auschwitz for forced laborers to find. In these dreamlike scenes, the girl’s stunning act of bravery and humanity are shot using black and white infrared cameras and accompanied by composer Mica Levi’s brooding score that sounds like a distorted digital didgeridoo.
Save for the film’s depiction of genocide, Levi’s compositions are Zone of Interest’s most disturbing element. Forged from a discordance of distorted chants and tones, Levi creates a morbid atmosphere that moviegoers will itch to escape from. At the packed showing I attended a block from London’s Piccadilly Circus, the oppressing wall of noise that befell during the end credits had me and other audience members racing for the exit. Yet, it complements the film brilliantly, refusing to let up upon the listener’s ears just as the clamor from Auschwitz never entirely ceases.
Zone’s score is not the only trait that will shock viewers. Throughout the over hour-and-a-half screening, one could hear gasps and muffled whispers of various four-letter words emerging from shocked mouths. I also contributed.
Zone is no sunny affair. No blockbuster. No crowd pleaser. But just like director Jonathan Glazer’s other tales he has produced over his 20-year career, it is compulsory viewing. Beginning with the darkly enjoyable, endlessly quotable crime flick Sexy Beast in 2000, which Paramount+ has unfortunately adapted into an unnecessary prequel series, Glazer’s films have pushed the line on acceptable content and taste. 2004’s Nicole Kidman-led drama Birth about love, loss, and reincarnation garnered accusations it sympathetically portrayed pedophilia. Glazer’s other portfolio of films, shorts, music videos, and advertisements also indulge into the surreal and controversial. Zone, at least as an experience rather than a standalone film, stands high above the rest of his previous work.
Sandra Hüller, who portrays Rudolf’s wife Hedwig, is the film’s standout. Capturing domestic bliss and cold-hearted maliciousness, sometimes in the same scene, Hüller’s performance explores the complexity behind the Holocaust’s perpetrators. Hüller, who also stars in the recently released and easier-to-watch excellent French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, has recently emerged as one of the most talented screen actors working today.
Christian Friedel’s lead portrayal of Rudolf combines outside content normalcy with hidden wickedness. Friedel best unleashes Rudolf’s true evil towards the film’s finale. After lazily and solitarily attending an SS gala, Rudolf confesses to having spent his time imagining how he would most effectively gas the ballroom full of his colleagues.
Later, as Rudolf descends a dark staircase in a Berlin SS office building, he hears distant echoes of vacuum cleaners from the present future. The office, now a museum hosting Holocaust artifacts, is sanitized unceremoniously by janitors. Returning to the past, Rudolf retches and gags but struggles to vomit. Instead, Rudolf continues to descend the staircase out of view and into the night.
Zone is effective because of its real-life characters: men and women who could blend in as your down-the-street neighbors at face value but are black-hearted underneath. They know the sinfulness of their actions and how history will view them, but proceed nonetheless.
Zone profoundly unsettles the viewer, forcing them to think deeply about human nature and the capacity to commit ungodly sins. That is the core of Glazer’s purpose and message — a message he succeeds in getting across.
Zone is not a film for casual Netflix viewing on a Tuesday night. It is a film for the historical record that I hope will be passed down for generations as an important document and cinematic event. It is a must-see I implore you to watch. Just know that if you venture out to the theaters to view it, The Zone of Interest will likely destroy you.