If you've heard anything about Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest," it's probably that the film helps to illustrate the famous Hannah Arendt passage about "the banality of evil" she observed in the Nazis. This is a very good place to start, but I feel that reducing the film to such a simple summation is doing it a disservice. There's a lot more going on here, and the more I read up on the making of the film and the history of the events depicted, the more fascinating it became.
Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) serves as the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. He lives just on the other side of the camp's walls, in a lovely house with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children. We watch the Höss family live a seemingly idyllic life, but being in such close proximity to the horrors of the concentration camp inevitably affects all of them. The camera never goes into the camp itself, but we constantly see the disturbing evidence of its activities on the edges of the frame. More than that, we hear what's going on there with increasing frequency.
Initially it seems like the film is making a case for how ordinary people could have ignored or excused the horrors of the Holocaust by showing us the Höss family in happy domesticity right next to Auschwitz. The contrast between the scenes of frolicking children and the inhumanity happening just offscreen is certainly effective. However, Rudolph Höss is far from an ordinary German citizen and we're shown many times that his wife is completely aware of what's going on. There's a shocking casualness with which Höss entertains Nazi colleagues in his garden, and discusses building crematoriums in his parlor. Hedwig's mother (Imogen Kogge) comes to visit, and Hedwig gives her a tour of the garden, barely even acknowledging the looming camp buildings on the other side of the wall. Later, it's made clear that Hedwig loves her life as one of the privileged in Auschwitz, and is proud of the home she's created. The Hösses aren't just ignoring the atrocities, but actively participating in them and making great efforts to compartmentalize them. However, this way of life has its limits, and unintended consequences.
Jonathan Glazer's filmmaking feels like it's getting more experimental over time. Here, his approach is very formalist, using long, lingering shots of carefully recreated environments and the characters carrying out their everyday lives. However, the sound design works against the sense of normalcy, offering a discordant Mica Levi score and disturbing aural interjections that are harder and harder to ignore. There are also the occasional narrative breaks. There are a few scenes of a young Polish girl (Julia Polaczek) who sneaks out at night to leave food for the Jewish laborers. These are shot with thermal cameras, creating sinister, seemingly inverted black and white images. An even more severe narrative break occurs in the final act that I will not spoil, except to admire Glazer's use of truly unique Holocaust imagery. The most striking and effective cinematic inventions, however, may be the scene transitions. Occasionally scenes will fade to black or to screens of a specific color, while the sounds of the concentration camp come to a crescendo. These serve as reminders of the constant, inescapable pain surrounding the Hösses, no matter what else is going on in their lives.
There's so much careful, deliberate work that went into every part of the film, from the performances to the art direction to the sound design. I appreciate that the slow pacing really let me examine the frames and consider the director's choices. Everything the camera focuses on is beautiful and pristine, reflecting the warped view of the Hösses and their friends. I've never seen a more pleasant depiction of the Nazis outside of a Leni Riefenstahl film. Friedel and Hüller got me invested in Rudolph Höss's woes over his career prospects on a personal level, and then, of course, reminded me what the consequences of his success meant for every non-Nazi in Europe, in the most chilling way possible.
More than any other film I've seen from 2023, there's a weight to "The Zone of Interest" that is unarguable. The subject matter is so dark, and handled with such deftness and fearlessness, it utterly defies any conventional categorization. I have no choice but to declare this a masterpiece, and one of the very best films I've ever seen.
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