The Zone of Interest, a British, American and Polish production directed by Jonathan Glazer, begins with a scene of bucolic bliss: a German-speaking family picnicking on a riverbank on a summer day. The specifics of character and dialogue are less important – you can barely catch the thread of conversation, anyway – than of the family’s mood: peace, tranquility, ease; on the father’s part, a note of concern. There have been a handful of recent films – Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things, Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – that have excellently refuted the tyranny of story in how we evaluate cinema, emphasising visual language, sound, rhythm, feeling to hypnotise, immerse and impart. The Zone of Interest, the deserved winner of this year’s Oscar for best international film, is the sharpest of these less plot-predominant films, and to the most nauseating end.
For the horror begins to creep into the frame as soon as the family returns to their house, a stately villa situated just beside a towering concrete wall. There’s a plume of smoke from the other side. A wordless, sickly looking man delivers supplies in a gray uniform. And there is a relentless, churning background chorus of screams, grunts, grinds and gunshots.
The Zone of Interest, loosely based on a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, works like a contaminant – slow and methodical, the rot largely invisible, leaving you hollowed out and stricken. Embedded with the family of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, we witness not the barbarity on the other side of the wall but the compartmentalisation, bureaucracy, domestic labor and dissociation required to perpetuate it.
Mostly, we just witness their routines, their play, their jokes and spats, the horrors they’ve either designed or habituated themselves to, or both. The scale of the atrocities is heard via extraordinary and gutting sound design; obviously indicated, but never seen, never directly visualised. Glazer doesn’t need to. The film’s restraint makes the family’s strained normalcy adjacent to genocide all the more damning, distressing, true.
The banality of evil makes for the most chilling and effective horror movie of the year, in part because Glazer also unravels the cliches around Hannah Arendt’s lasting proclamation on the Holocaust. Everyone, even the children, knows on some level what is going on, what they’re hearing. Höss, of course, is orchestrating the genocide, signing off on blueprints of an industrial human crematorium. His wife Hedwig (an outstanding Sandra Hüller), who adores their dream home, warns the Polish girl who works in their house that she could “have my husband spread your ashes” across the fields. The young boys make gassing sounds at each other as they play. Hedwig’s mother eyes the smokestacks with resigned horror, then sleeps, then goes to breakfast.
You don’t have to strain to see contemporary parallels to such dehumanisation, though Glazer, who is Jewish, made the connection explicit at the Oscars. “All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now’,” he said in a speech calling out Israel’s war in Gaza, which to date has killed over 44,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children.
That speech drew both applause and condemnation from fellow Jewish artists, but the point stands: having the capacity to love, to participate in a nuclear family, to run a household or play does not preclude one’s ability to rationalise and accept mass murder. The Zone of Interest is perhaps the most effective vehicle I’ve seen for demonstrating how humans do this to other humans – a message that, devastatingly and infuriatingly, continues to bear repeating.
