I finally worked up the resolve to see Jonathan Glazer’s intense, disturbing masterpiece that takes a wholly unique approach to its harrowing subject matter.
There are some movies that you’re simply never going to watch on a whim, and that you almost have to be emotionally prepared for. Everything about Glazer’s searing Holocaust drama is designed to make you deeply uncomfortable and it’s not something to be enjoyed in a conventional sense. It is however a powerful, compelling and sobering insight into the ordinariness of evil.
The film is a fly-on-the-wall look into the daily life of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children. In their minds, they’re living their best life out in the country, enjoying picnics by the river, celebrating birthdays, spending many lazy hours in the family’s beautiful garden proudly tended by Hedwig. It would all be so normal and wholesome, if not for the fact that a mere wall separates this idyllic household from Auschwitz. This shocking, incomprehensible dissonance between the mundanity of everyday life and the horrors on the edges of the film is what makes The Zone of Interest such a hard watch.
We never take a step beyond the wall, but every waking moment of the family life is accompanied by the noise emanating from the industrial complex of death: the hum of the furnaces working day and night, gun shots and screams. The extraordinary, immersive sound design is in fact the main reason to watch this film at the cinema. The family is desensitised to the degree where they no longer hear the noise, but the stress level it creates for the viewer is incredible. The same can be said of the sparsely used droning score from composer Mica Levi, whose work added to the most unnerving moments in Glazer’s Under the Skin.
The reality behind the wall has other ways of seeping into the family life, in small but chilling details. One of the older boys amuses himself before sleep by inspecting human teeth with a torchlight. Hedwig models a newly acquired mink coat in front of a mirror, with the former owner’s lipstick still in the pocket. The nearby river is no longer swimmable when it becomes polluted with the ashes of the dead.
Glazer obviously approached his film with an intent to strip away as much “film” sheen as possible, leaving no barrier between the viewer and the lives of Hösses. It makes exclusive use of the natural light, with no sepia colouring popular in war films, and cameras positioned around the house to give the experience a stark, documentary feel. There is of course a limit to this approach, as any film, however presented, will always be an artificial construction, but there’s no doubt that the result is a highly original depiction of the Holocaust I’ve never seen before.
On occasions, Glazer breaks away from the documentary approach with the artsy night time sequences shot with a special thermal imaging camera. At first they looked so eerie it took me some time to realise that these scenes were in fact showing rare acts of kindness and resistance, with a local Polish girl sneaking out to leave apples for the Jewish prisoners. This contrast of good deeds happening in the dark while evil goes on in broad daylight only adds to the overall disorientating feeling.
The most remarkable thing about Rudolf Höss in this movie is just how unremarkable and unassuming he is; a dull bureaucrat with a silly haircut and soft voice. Later in the film, we see his meetings with the heads of other camps, which are likewise presented in such an ordinary and dull way you almost have to pinch yourself to remember what exactly is being discussed: a mass extermination of human beings.
My own takeaway is that the film doesn’t aim to present its characters as exceptionally monstrous, but rather suggests that the ability to disassociate, dehumanise and adapt to the most extreme circumstances is simply something we humans do. It brought to mind a Terry Pratchett quote, there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do. Depressing but true.
In the final stretches of the film, there’s a devastating jump into the present time which, among other things, further drives home how easy it is for any normal person to become desensitised to unspeakable horrors. Our natural self-protection mechanism can be a blessing, and also a sinister attribute that makes evil on a grand scale possible.
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