The Zone of Interest (Preview)
Reviewed by Robert Koehler

Produced by James Wilson and Ewa Puszczyńska; directed by Jonathan Glazer; screenplay by Jonathan Glazer based on the novel by Martin Amis; cinematography by Łukasz Żal; edited by Paul Watts; production design by Chris Oddy; costume design by Małgorzata Karpiuk; set decoration by Joanna Kus and Katarzyna Sikora; visual effects supervisor Guillaume Ménard; sound by Johnnie Burn; music by Mica Levi; starring Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier, Lilli Falk, Julia Polaczek, Imogen Kogge, Medusa Knopf, Zuzanna Kobiela, Stephanie Petrowitz, and Max Beck. Color and B&W, 106 min., German dialogue with English subtitles. An A24 release.

Jean-Luc Godard’s denunciation of cinema and its failure to translate the true horrors of the Holocaust never went far enough. The cinema’s inability to render the various aspects of the Nazis’ systematic destruction of Jewish Europe extends to a failure to do the same work on the Nazi problem itself—the source of the horrors. While Hollywood Nazis resemble porcelain-textured Teutonic robots, devoid of emotion and close cousins of horror movie monsters, organizing mechanized armies and factories of death, Leni Riefenstahl’s elaborate propaganda, stressing vast formations of soldiers and workers, emphasizes choreography and spectacle through energetic montage and the distanced view of a landscape painter. In both depictions, regardless of ideological polarities, the result is a one-dimensional reality. The problem stems from something pernicious lying in the heart of cinema: its weakness for seduction by varied forms of spectacle, whether Fritz Lang’s Art Moderne robot or Stanley Kubrick’s red-nosed killer computer. 

Only two filmmakers, Harun Farocki (in his nonfiction film about Auschwitz, Bilderkrieg [1987], which repurposes Allied images of the camp), and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (in his trilogy of Hitlerian mythology, including Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King [1972], Karl May [1974], and Our Hitler: A Film from Germany [1977]), resist the expressed aesthetic designs of Nazi culture, which was, above all, dedicated to the full range of facile visual forms aimed at social and thought control—whether in architecture or graphic design, uniform haberdashery or cinema propaganda. 

Now, we may add an additional filmmaker to this class of two: the British writer-director Jonathan Glazer in The Zone of Interest. Set primarily in the family household of Rudolf Höss, the actual Commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp megacomplex, from 1939 to 1943, and again for the extended summer of 1944, when about 400,000 Hungarian Jews were slaughtered, Glazer’s film is revolutionary in its thorough denial of, and confrontation with, cinema’s weakness for visual seduction. Höss led the design and execution at the center of the Nazi “zone of interest,” the “Interessengebiet” or administrative area to which SS were assigned. The title is ironic given the film’s focus on the Höss family’s life as its “zone of interest,” rather than on the greater Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, envisioned as both the primary death camp and a hub of life and activity for a new generation of German homesteaders and businesspeople following Hitler’s call to occupy lands to “The East”—the euphemism applied to occupied Poland.

The Zone of Interest precisely reverses the standard movie formula for depicting the Nazi project and more than eighty years of the cinema’s inability to depict and illuminate Nazi evil. Very often, such movies begin with the Nazi machinations, and then may allow a glimpse or two of the private life of this or that Nazi character. This can be done in interesting ways, as in Patton (1970); but it’s usually trite, as in The Night of the Generals (1967).

Although Glazer was attracted to the subject by Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same title, Glazer dispensed with Amis’s narrative of a fictionalized (and renamed) Höss involved in a tale of marital jealousy and revenge, effectively retaining only the book’s outlines of the family unit: Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children, while adding frissons of character interest with the arrival of Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge), and the nocturnal activities of a young Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), an actual member of the Polish resistance, who lived in the adjacent community of Oświęcim and left apples and other fruit for camp laborers working in mining digs beyond the camp limits. She also recovered a piece of music written by an Auschwitz survivor, Joseph Wulf. These sequences, filmed in black and white with Polish military infrared cameras, result in spectral images hovering between dream and nightmare as they capture the only local resistance to Nazi extermination.

In stark contrast to Amis’s peculiar focus on a love triangle, Glazer makes his most artistically and politically crucial decision by depicting a cohesive Höss family unit. They appear to be a happy bunch, first seen in the film’s opening image enjoying the sun along a river’s edge on a perfect fall day. They celebrate Rudolf’s birthday, later frolic in the backyard pool, and enjoy the garden that Hedwig for the past three years has expanded into her own private Eden and which she proudly shows off to her impressed mother. The children are generally well-behaved and obedient, and Hedwig—assisted by silent local Polish house servants and two male camp prisoners delivering goods—is happily investing time in what she thinks of as her dream home and dream life, even, in her words, “beyond a dream.” 

In a perfect coincidence of historical accuracy and visual dramatics, which Glazer uses to chilling effect and creative variation, the family home lies just over the wall from the Auschwitz camp itself, an image that strikes the viewer with surrealist horror but which the family blithely accepts as, in effect, the place where Papa goes to work. Most crucial of all (especially to Hedwig), the family is fulfilling Hitler’s dream of making “The East” German, as she explains in one of her few emotional scenes with her husband, who’s just informed her that he’s being reassigned to Berlin as Deputy Inspector of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate. As a signal of her attachment to the home, Hedwig insists that she and the family stay in Auschwitz rather than join him. Glazer thus repositions the Nazi project as beginning in the Heimat, the home…

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Robert Koehler contributes writing and criticism for Cinema Scope, Variety, DGA Quarterly, and Sight and Sound.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3