We are at the tastefully appointed villa of a family of considerable means, and by the looks of the wardrobe and the hairstyles and the production design, it appears the time period is mid-20th century. There’s a lovely garden in the yard, and an in-ground swimming pool as well. It appears idyllic.
The man of the house gets ready for work, but before he leaves, his wife and children surprise him with a birthday gift: a beautifully crafted canoe. A deliveryman arrives, bringing supplies for the kitchen and bundles of clothes. The woman of the house dumps a pile of blouses on a table and tells the staffers they can each pick one. Upstairs in her bedroom, she tries on a fur coat, admiring herself in the mirror. She then hands the coat to a housemaid, telling her it needs to be hemmed and cleaned.
It all seems so mundane, so typical, so normal, but there’s a chilling and horrific context to these scenes. As we quickly come to realize in Jonathan Glazer’s searing and hauntingly powerful “The Zone of Interest,” the man in question is Rudolf Höss (played with stark efficiency by Christian Friedel), the German SS officer who was the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, and the woman is his wife, Hedwig (an equally effective Sandra Hüller). The stately villa is literally next door to the camp, with high walls blocking out the views, but the skies unable to contain the plumes of smoke, the cries of anguish, the occasional burst of gunfire. That deliveryman was a prisoner, almost certainly living out the last few days of his life.
The blouses and the fur coat belonged to Jewish women who have been executed. In a later scene, one of Höss’ five children examines his prized collection of gold teeth, with all the curiosity of a child playing with marbles. It’s sickening in its simplicity.
Throughout the film, we are watching people who do not behave as if they’re unrelatable, robotically evil monsters, which makes them all the more terrifying; they are the very personification of what the historian Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Höss and his wife and his family, and the frequent guests who come to the house for picnics and swim parties, are living in an Aryan bubble, tuning out the horrors just beyond that wall, having completely bought into the Nazi party line. The sounds of mass murder on the other side of the walls and the barbed wire are barely acknowledged. We never go inside the walls of Auschwitz; most of the film is on the grounds of the villa, save for a few scenes following Höss on the job — and he does treat it like a job, as if he’s an executive hoping to keep moving up in the company.
In one scene, Höss meets with a team to go over plans for a more effective means of exterminating prisoners and disposing of their bodies because plans have been expedited to transport 700,000 Jews out of Hungary. It’s all discussed in a matter-of-fact manner. There’s also a running thread, shot in the style of a black-and-white negative, about a girl who sneaks out in the dead of night and places apples around the camp in a gesture of kindness.
Glazer uses surveillance-style cameras (he has described the technique as “Big Brother in a Nazi house”) that keep a distance from Höss and his wife as they go about the business of being spouses and parents. Late one night, in their twin beds, they reminisce about a spa getaway, with Hedwig prodding her husband to promise they’ll go again. Höss is the one who climbs on his horse and makes the one-minute commute to the camp and oversees the murders of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, but it’s clear that Hedwig is fully onboard with everything and revels in the perks of her husband’s status.
In fact, one of the biggest shows of emotion in the entire film comes when Höss informs Hedwig he is to be transferred to Berlin. This is a woman who couldn’t possibly care less about the bloodshed of all those innocent people, but she is filled with outrage and feels like a victim because the family members might have to give up their cushy lifestyle.
Friedel and Hüller turn in remarkable performances, never shading their respective characters with empathy and yet making them all too real and thus loathsome in a skin-crawling way. Glazer’s deliberately passive camera work serves the story well. “The Zone of Interest” never attempts to explain why Höss is the way he is; what possible full explanation can there be? What it does, and does so effectively, is remind us that the orchestrators of this genocide weren’t one-dimensional, psychopathic creatures out of a horror film; they were something far more terrifying. They were people.
