The Zone of Interest

“The Zone of Interest takes the most unlikely of stands towards female autonomy and gender equity: Women can be just as callous, just as brutal, as men.

Title: The Zone of Interest (2023)
Director: Jonathan Glazer 👨🏼🇬🇧
Writers: Screenplay by Jonathan Glazer 👨🏼🇬🇧 based on the novel by Martin Amis 👨🏼🇬🇧

Reviewed by Dana 👩🏼🇺🇸♿

Technical: 4/5

If Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest wants one thing, it’s for its audience to sit in abject discomfort. There are no breathtaking sets caught at just the right time of day, no painstakingly-composed pieces meant to evoke the spirit or mood of a people, no close-up on lips whispering the name of a sled. His stark approach to filmmaking feels terribly appropriate for the brutality of the topic, refusing to find beauty in the systematic murder of millions, often in plain view.

Based loosely on Martin Amis' 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, which contains fictionalized versions of Nazi commandant Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), Glazer dispenses with Amis' veneer of fiction and the affair at the novel's center, choosing instead to focus on the real and terribly disturbing depiction of the Höss family building an idyllic life directly outside the walls of Auschwitz— specifically, Auschwitz III-Monowitz. (Auschwitz was not one camp, but a complex of more than forty.)

In his depiction of the ordinary day-to-day lives of Rudolph and Hedwig, Glazer delivers an unflinching embodiment of the phrase coined by political theorist Hannah Arendt: the banality of evil. Published first as a series of articles in The New Yorker, Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the central organizers of the Holocaust, who had escaped to Argentina following the war and was captured, taken to Israel, tried, and ultimately hanged in 1962. Her coverage sparked substantial criticism, including for Arendt’s contention that "[the] murderers were not sadists or killers by nature—on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did.” Eichmann, and those like him, Arendt wrote, were not monsters, but ordinary men.

In The Zone of Interest, Glazer presents the face of an ordinary family, living under a totalitarian society in which norms have shifted and respectability redefined: In wartime Germany, Arendt contends, the very compulsion to turn away is far more reprehensible than the act of violence. Hedwig, intent on building and preserving her dream home, proudly shows her mother around the gardens and beams when she shares the nickname bestowed upon her, “The Queen of Auschwitz.” They pay no mind to the sounds of barking dogs and gunshots or to the screams and wails of prisoners; when her mother departs without a word, seemingly unable to stomach the orange glow of the sky at night and bursts of fire from the gassing and disposal human beings, Hedwig reacts as though offended.

Though a far cry from a comprehensive study of Arendt’s contributions to political thought, The Zone of Interest makes a valiant attempt at capturing the author’s Eichmann coverage. Glazer’s stubborn refusal to romanticize or excuse evil, and his willingness to lay bare the ways in which Germans were not only complicit but eager participants in the great machine of mass murder, feels vital in this moment. Unlike Arendt’s writing in The New Yorker, however, Glazer fails to present his thesis to a wide audience, and here is where one begins to wonder whether the auteur may not have read, or understood, Arendt’s work much beyond the famous phrase. Though Parasite (2019) made clear that audiences are willing to read subtitles and Americans will embrace a cast largely unknown to them, The Zone of Interest already narrows its net by way of its difficult subject matter and absence of thrilling intrigue. For an English-speaking director to deliberately choose German as the film's language seems like a bold act of sabotage to prevent anyone who might actually need to reflect on their complicity from ever seeing the film.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? Yes

An early scene shows Hedwig and several other women sifting through piles of silks, as though they’ve just received a package from the Sears catalog. It may come across as exactly that, at first glance, to anyone not fully steeped in the horrors of the Reich machinery. It unfolds almost like a series of breadcrumbs, as Hedwig tries on a fur, finds and tests out red lipstick found in the coat’s pocket, and notes that the lining is ripped. If, by that point, the viewer cannot grasp the truth—that this coat and those silks were stripped from prisoners upon arrival, money hidden in the lining ripped out by the guards—they must stop short as Hedwig casually mentions putting in an “order” for more goods. Sweets, she says later to her husband, if he can get some.

As a dichotomy to the willing, even eager, participation of the Höss family in mass murder, Glazer offers a glimpse of one such act of courage. Jarringly presented through thermal photography, and eerily evocative of how a predator might follow its target in the dark of night, a young woman frantically shoves apples into the muddy wall of what appears to be a trench. The first vignette comes across as rather incomprehensible, following as it does a scene of Rudolph and Hedwig’s young daughter sitting in the middle of the night at the window of their home and staring out at the smokestacks belching the burnt remains of human beings into the night sky, telling her father when he asks that she was “handing out sugar.”

Is the sequence a part of a sleepwalking child’s dream? Her nightmare? Does she, unbeknownst to her father, steal out at night to leave food for those not yet ordered to their deaths? Not until the second sequence does it become apparent that the young woman is both real and unrelated to the Höss family, as the thermal imaging follows her hiding pears behind the shovels that, come daylight, the inmates will use to dig pits in which to dump bodies and clear the char and ash from the gas chambers to make way for new bodies. Outside the camp’s gates, the shots transition to color, and the young woman waits for guards to pass before making her way home. She, it seems, represents the choice that the Höss family, and thousands like them, had: to be righteous, to refuse to go along, to retain their humanity.

The shift in focus from the book’s erotic affair to Hedwig’s normal life (to the extent that “normalcy” exists mere feet from a concentration camp, and Glazer’s central point is that it very much does) serves not only to place the real evil of the Holocaust in the fore, but gives agency to Hedwig in a most disconcerting manner. Hedwig’s autonomy stands as a theme through the film, in her refusal to give up the dream home she’s built: “They’d have to drag me out of here,” she declares without the slightest hint of irony. When her husband is ordered to a new role, in a new place, she demands that he stop it happening; he cannot, though he does receive a glowing letter of support from a colleague for his ability to murder prisoners so efficiently and at such scale. She refuses to leave, insisting that Rudolph allow her and the children to stay where they are—for her to do her job, she emphasizes, of raising their children, while he does his. The film’s overall emphasis on Hedwig’s surety takes the most unlikely of stands towards female autonomy and gender equity: Women can be just as callous, just as brutal, as men. They are not too ignorant, nor too squeamish, nor beholden to their emotions to be willing perpetrators of genocide.

Race: 1/5

The Zone of Interest, by nature of its narrow focus on the wartime Nazi state, entirely omits voices of color—and it’s a rare instance where that stands as perfectly appropriate, in the context of the narrative. While people of color did play significant roles in real life—for all the World War II films in the mainstream, it may still come as a shock to learn that China, Ethiopia, and Egypt all played significant roles in the conflict, or that Hitler took inspiration from America's Jim Crow laws to craft his anti-Jewish edicts—Glazer makes a very specific film about a very specific aspect of the Third Reich’s quest for racial purity.

Yet the film, and the Holocaust itself, are very much concerned with the question of race. Race—and this should not be a controversial point, but in case it is, I can comfortably hide behind Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, and 400 years of case law—is a social construct, and in the context of the Third Reich, Jews were deemed a race, and one to be eliminated. Along with Romani, Slavs, and others, Jews represented to Nazi idealogues a threat to genetic superiority. The racialization of Jews was not a new phenomenon in Nazi Germany, and Hitler hardly cornered the market on the concept of racial purity. As prisoners in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, and a sickening list of other sites were imprisoned and systematically exterminated, laws in the United States still forbade interracial marriage. And as the heroic Black Tuskegee Airmen fought for Allied victory, the racist, gruesome Tuskegee experiment was only a decade into its forty-year span.

All of which is to say that in the context of The Zone of Interest, on either side of the walls of Auschwitz, race, not religion, serves as the primary line of demarcation. But even adjusting to this mindset, the film falls stunningly flat on representation. The only Jews depicted are those working as servants in the Höss home; they have no personalities beyond fear, no trace of humanity, as though the Nazis had in fact been successful in stripping it away. Amis’ novel does at least contain the perspective of a Jewish work camp inmate, though the character is relegated to a secondary status; Glazer makes a deliberate choice to never peer inside the walls of Auschwitz, nor inside the souls of those forced to work in the family’s home. One might give the auteur the benefit of the doubt, as the omission reflects Glazer’s fixation on the irredeemable antagonists. One might be less forgiving by pointing out that such a myopic view was precisely the one that the Höss family and the Nazi state would have preferred.

The film's focus on daily acts of complicity and evil serve an important role in grappling with moral responsibility, but also bolster the argument made by writer Dara Horn that "people love dead Jews." There seems to be no end to the number of stories about how Jews died, Horn notes, but very little interest in the ways in which they live. In his focus on the killers and not the survivors, Glazer does nothing to buck the trend.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.83/5

In its blunt and unromantic way, The Zone of Interest implicitly critiques inaction and self-protection in the face of cruelty. Yet there is a nagging feeling of inadequacy, that in Glazer’s quest to make an important film with an important point of view, he lost sight of why media matters. Key to the entire Eichmann trial that Arendt documented was its international broadcast, laying bare survivor testimony for all to witness. In 1965, ABC aired Judgment at Nuremberg, a dramatization of the Nuremberg trials, as its Sunday night movie. While not completely true to history, the film was praised for bringing the concepts of justice and moral responsibility to a wide audience.

With a public already inundated daily by stories of atrocity around the world, still recovering from the loss and isolation of a pandemic, Glazer already faces an uphill battle in attracting an audience. The director ensures that moments like Hedwig's sorting of stolen clothes are seen for what they are, made more obvious through a scene of the elder Höss son playing with a box of human teeth, and by recycling the concept of an “order” through Rudolph and his compatriots as he extends an offer for another officer to take his pick of new loot. It is the subtlety, the banality, that are most effective. But, here again, Glazer’s choices limit the efficacy of the moment: For the full emotional impact to hit, the viewer must already know that these things happened, and the images must already haunt them.

In Eichmann In Jerusalem, Arendt recounts the story of Anton Schmidt, a sergeant in the German Army. In charge of a patrol in Poland, Schmidt had run into members of the Jewish underground. For five months and without compensation, Schmidt had provided them with forged papers and military trucks, and was ultimately arrested and executed. “How utterly different everything would be today,” Arendt laments, “if only more such stories could have been told.”

There survive a number of stories, referred to by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, as the “Righteous Among the Nations,” of non-Jews who—with no expectation of personal gain and at great risk to themselves—saved Jews during the Holocaust. In Courage to Care, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote: “The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care.”

The Zone of Interest offers a view of evil that is rarely seen, with no room to let the viewer relax. That feels appropriate, even necessary, to the subject matter. The question is, how many viewers have the courage to care enough to simply watch, to accept the discomfort and fight the instinct to turn away?

Like The Zone of Interest? Try these period films with Jewish characters.

Grade: CLiMarch 9, 2024