The “zone of interest” is the euphemism the Nazis used to describe the area around Auschwitz, which included where the SS Nazi concentration camp commandant Rudolf Hoess and his wife Hedwig lived with their children, in a house right next to the death camp. In the historical drama THE ZONE OF INTEREST, we see Hoess and his wife going about their ordinary-seeming private life, trying to build “an idyllic life” right in the shadow of Auschwitz, while determinedly ignoring the horror that was happening right next to them. This chilling embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” is at the center of director Jonathan Glazer’s powerful historic drama THE ZONE OF INTEREST.
German star Sandra Huller (ANATOMY OF A FALL, TONI ERDMANN) plays Hedwig, the wife of the Nazi SS officer commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Rudolf Hoess (played by another German star, Christian Friedel), as the couple raise their children and “strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp,” as the film’s notes put it.
Both Huller and Friedel resisted the idea of playing Nazis, which is no wonder, but the point of this drama is to portray both the ordinary humanity of the camp commandant and his wife and the extraordinary inhumanity of their actions and ideas, and the actors were persuaded when they understood the film’s intentions. A sense of the “banality of evil” pervades this film, as it focuses on their rationalizing of the awful and a human capacity to deliberately ignore cruelty, particularly in the service of personal ambitions. Glazer makes the point that this human failing is not something of the past, but something that could happen today. If anything, it illustrates how close this flaw in humanity is to the surface even now.
The idea of building a “dream life” next to a place of mass death seems both bizarre and inconceivable yet that is what the real couple tried to do, which required some determined, cold blindness to the evil on the other side of the wall. As the family’s father goes off to work, we stay behind with the family and wife Hedwig, who is thrilled with the large house and has remade the field next to it into a lovely garden.
The film opens with the family enjoying a beautiful day on the banks of a lovely river, swimming and picnicking. We watch them do ordinary things – throwing a birthday party for the father, watching the children play or going off to school, watching the wife have coffee with friends or work in her garden. Their life is comfortable, with a large house, and beyond it, a large garden with flowers, a patio, playground and even a swimming pool. Beyond that are stables for the commandant’s horses and fields and forests to ride in, with a river nearby. But the high wall the family compound shares with the concentration camp is just steps away from the house’s front door.
When Hoess leaves for his work, we don’t follow him but stay with the wife as she goes about her day.
We don’t see what happens in the concentration camp, but we do hear sounds, of shouting or gunfire, and sometimes we see smoke rising from the chimney or ash falling on the flowers. We see a few prisoners working in the garden and a slave-labor detail toiling outside the walls. Although there is no on-screen violence, it is ever present in our minds.
The private life of the Nazi commandant and his family is the focus, and following them, particularly the wife Hedwig, through their ordinary days emphasize their human side, yet slowly reveals the inhumanity in their characters as well, aided by their selfishness, personal ambitions and deliberate blindness. When her mother comes to visit, she asks about where the Jews are, and Hedwig cold says they are on the other side of the wall, in a voice dripping with hate. In another scene, we see Hedwig and some friends, even staff, go through some clothes. We assume they are Hedwig’s castoffs, until she picks a fur coat and takes it upstairs to try on, and we realize they are possessions of newly-arrived prisoners. A current of chilling horror runs throughout the film, as it coolly observes their domestic life in a distant way, and lets their actions reveal their true dark nature.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST was loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ novel of the same name by writer/director Jonathan Glazer. The film has been nominated for an Oscar and won both the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. Glazer decided to take a very different approach to making a “Holocaust film,” by refraining from showing the violence we know is going on inside the camp and instead focusing on the Nazis perpetrators, to show their humanity rather than demonizing them, to pointedly underline that it was ordinary humans who carried out the inhumanity of the Holocaust.
Jonathan Glazer, who was born in London to a Jewish family, has said that this film is not about the past but the present. The British director shot his German-language historical drama on location in Poland at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The commandant’s house still stands right next to the wall of part of the camp but due to restrictions at the protected historic site, the director decided to recreate the house interiors and garden, which were new at the time, for the film in an old officers barracks adjacent to Auschwitz. Being at the actual site added to the film’s feeling of tension, as did the director’s choice to film scenes in the house with multiple surveillance cameras, which gives it a “fly on the wall” vibe.
The commandant in Martin Amis’ novel was based on the real Nazi Rudolf Hoess, but director Glazer leaned into that even more, researching details about the commandant and the time period when he was at Auschwitz. To be clear, despite the similar name, Rudolf Hoess is not the same person as Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler’s top leaders. This Nazi, Rudolf Hoess was the long-time commandant of Auschwitz and is considered a possible architect of the Nazis’ “final solution,” an efficient killer who was hanged after the war.
Glazer set the film near a time when Hoess received a promotion that would have meant relocating to Berlin, and his wife Hedwig became upset at the thought of giving up the beautiful house and garden she had worked on so hard. A couple reluctant to relocate for a husband’s job has a human ordinariness to it but we quickly are reminded that his “job” is killing when he meets with his Nazi “bosses.”
While the film is presented from the viewpoint of the Nazi family, it is not their point-of-view but a dispassionate observation of who and what they really are. Another thing that sets this film apart from most Holocaust-themed films is it’s use of experimental, symbolic scenes and that it refrains from showing violence directly. That is not to say it it absent, as it is very present in our minds, if not visible on screen.
While many scenes are presented in a straightforward dramatic way, a few are strikingly experimental. One example is a scene where the commandant reads bedtimes stories, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, to his children. As he reads, we see black-and-white negative images of a little girl walking through the woods. Slowly we realize it is not an illustration of the fairy tale but infrared images of a girl who reaches her destination and begins pushing apples into piles of soil. Her purpose is mysterious until a later scene, where we see the camp’s prisoners taken to a site nearby working with those same piles of dirt, and see the apples embedded in them, and remember an earlier scene where the commandant rode his horse through a field filled with fallen apples. We make the connection that we were watching a Polish girl from a local village, secretly leaving food under cover of night.
The film’s sense of horror comes from knowing what is happening rather than any scenes of violence. We do not see the violence on the other side of the wall but we do hear sounds, of gunshots and shouting, and we see the smoke rising from the chimney. While the couple blocks out what is happening right next to them, we see one of the children become upset by the sounds. When Hedwig’s mother comes for a visit, she is unable to ignore the horror going on next door the way her daughter does, and cuts her visit short.
The tone of the film is cool and distant despite the intimacy of the situations. Scenes were shot in an observational style, with few close-ups. Both Sandra Huller as Hedwig, who is more the film’s main focus, and Christian Friedel, as Rudolf Hoess, play the characters in an emotionally restrained manner, with dead eyes and cold smiles.
Hedwig and Rudolf Hoess compartmentalize, so they can block out the horror and their responsibility for it. It is more about self-interests and personal dreams. The couple don’t spout Nazi ideas – but they talk about their personal ambitions and revel in living in material comfort. In one scene, the couple talk about plans for becoming farmers after the war, in a creepy fantasy of Ayran prosperity.
The film is not the typical historical drama about the Holocaust, not just by focusing on the Nazi commandant’s family, but by it’s fly-on-the-wall observations of the family and some artistically creative dream-like symbolic scenes. The style of the film is artistic rather than a more conventional drama, with surveillance-like footage, very tamped-down performances and some surreal moments, which might not be to the taste of some audiences.
The ordinariness of their family life, their behavior and discussions revealing their selfishness, their refusal to look at or take responsibility for the evil in which they are participants, serves as a reminder that the potential for inhumanity can lurk in the most ordinary seeming human, and therefor we must be vigilant about “never again.” The film shows the truth of the phrase “the banality of evil” and that the possibility of evil is not something safely in the past, but within human nature still.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST, in German with English subtitles, opens Friday, Jan. 26, in theaters.
RATING: 3.5 out of 4 stars
