The Zone of Interest review: Unsettling Holocaust drama on the ordinariness of evil

There is a clear wall between Goeth and the audience. Even a sense of alienation persists through the movie; you cannot associate with him, and he only evokes strong emotions of horror and hatred. But when it comes to Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest — loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, and nominated for Oscars in five categories (Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, International Feature, and Sound) — none of these attributes fit him.

The movie at no point tries to humanise the Nazi commandant or glorify the barbarian by giving him charisma. Rather, he is just ordinary; he has built a perfect idyllic life with his wife Hedwig, played by Sandra Huller. Her Edenic garden, which is filled with dahlias, sunflowers, herbs, and vegetables, abuts the wall of the camp. Her blissful life goes on uninterrupted as she strolls with her toddler in the garden, admiring the white and blood-red dahlias, while the sound of quaint birds chirping in the distance mixes with the screaming from the camp. The movie is unsettling, to say the least, but the real horror is the mundane lives of its evil characters. The audience has nowhere to hide. You have to grapple with the serenity of their routine lives as smoke blows from the gas chambers from a distance.

A strange level of moral obliviousness

In one scene, a worker spreads the ashes from the camp over the soil, and produce continues to grow from this fertile soil. The casual indifference of the inhabitants of the house and nature is not a convoluted metaphor, rather it directly points to the present. In an interview, Glazer said, “The present-tense of the film, everything has to serve that. I didn’t want to make a museum piece. I didn’t want to make a film where we felt this kind of safe distance from these events ... everything here is there in the service of that idea, of how there are similarities to the perpetrators rather than our similarities with the victims ... there is no distance between now and then.” The director has said in various interviews that he wanted to examine the characters anthropologically, avoiding the artifice and glamour of cinema.

Glazer uses his camera in a Big Brother fashion, like a fly on the wall. The cameras were obscured in the bushes with no film lighting, and the scenes were filmed simultaneously. The director has said that this allowed him to capture things in real time, which creates the present tense as an experience. Additionally, the movie does not use aesthetics to give it that warm and aged look particular to period dramas, nor does it use any filters to soften the image. The lenses are sharp and crisp, the Nazi world resembles our own. In one scene, Rudolf Höss walks into a pristine white doctor’s room, and the doctor casually asks him about his bowel movements. The bright white room with the commandant on the table undergoing his routine check-up looks like a basic medical examination; even war criminals need regular check-ups.

Rudolf Höss is an ordinary, boring man who is concerned with following orders, i.e, killing the Jews, in an effective manner. His persona resembles Adolf Eichmann, the infamous SS officer whose controversial trail took the world by storm. His defence, Robert Servatius, said that his client’s personality was that of a ‘common mailman’. Similarly, Rudolf is not a monster; he takes his children boating, laughs with his wife at night, is concerned about the flowers in his garden, and yet he is capable of mass murder. 

In one particularly harrowing scene, the concealment methods of the victims are mere chit-chat to elicit laughter. In the scene, Hedwig is having coffee with her friends, and one of them candidly tells her that she found a diamond in the toothpaste of a Jewish victim. “I have ordered more toothpaste because you never know.” Hedwig jokingly tells her mother that she is called the Queen of Auschwitz. These ‘normal’, hollow people exhibit a strange level of moral obliviousness.

A crude irony

Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), reports, “Worse, his (Adolf Eichmann) was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semistism or indoctrination of any kind ... And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar — and missed the greatest moral and legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all ‘normal persons’, must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was ‘no exception within the Nazi regime’.”

The brilliant soundscape of the movie stands testament to the art of showing rather than telling. The sound will not let you forget that brutalities are being committed at this very instant on the opposite side of the wall. The sound designer, Johnnie Burns, committed to the realism in the movie, did field recording to build a library of sounds. The audio is immersive and extremely unsettling; the audience does not see the images of violence rather hears them. The shouting of the victims layers over the conversations in the garden and Höss villa. The dissonance between what we are seeing and what we are hearing lends the movie a nerve-wracking aura that overarches their domestic lives.

There are small moments of hope as a Polish girl secretly leaves food for the victims in the dead of the night. Here, hope is not radiant and filled with sunlight, but rather an inverse of the bright life of the Nazi characters. The scenes are shot with a military camera, and the black and red infrared scenes are visually some of the most horrific scenes in the movie. The girl is pitch black, contrasted against the white background, a reversal of the ‘normal’ situation. This symbolism is extremely pertinent when situated in the present. The Zone of Interest becomes an allegory for present times; we too have built walls around ourselves. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Palestinians “children of darkness” in a tweet. As Hedwig tries on a coat plundered from the victims, admiring herself in the mirror, images of Israeli soldiers posing with the undergarments of displaced Palestinian women flash through my mind. The crude irony stares us in the face.

Unlike our modern law-abiding citizens, the Polish girl follows her instinct, resisting the temptation to live a ‘normal’ life. Rudolf Höss’ actions are crimes only in retrospect. He was just following the orders, trying to gas his victims effectively, to the best of his ability. His evil was banal. As Hannah Arendt says, “Evil in the Third Riech had lost the quality by which most people recognise it — the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbours off to their doom … and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”