The Zone of Interest Review: A Masterpiece and a Must-Watch

In a room that radiates wealth — the smooth wooden floor has a beautiful carpet; the wallpaper is tasteful; on the dressing table, there are pretty, glass bottles; the furniture is made of expensive wood; there are many mirrors — a woman pulls a fur coat out of a sack. It’s lined with silk that gleams in the morning light. She puts it on and out of one of the pockets, she pulls out a lipstick. She puts the tube on the dressing table. Then she checks the lining of the coat. After giving the coat to a maid, ordering her to launder it, the woman returns to her dressing table. She puts on the lipstick. It’s red and evidently not new.

It’s impossible to not be reminded of the recent videos that show Israeli soldiers cheerfully picking up items from abandoned homes in Palestine while watching The Zone of Interest (2023), which won the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Set in the 1940s, director Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant film is a gut-punch of a reminder that history does in fact repeat itself, but in ways that perhaps are beyond our capacity to predict. The women who cheerfully gossip about the things they’ve acquired thanks to raids on Jewish homes — one says she’s asked for more toothpaste after discovering a diamond in a tube, reminding us of how Jews were stripped of everything they owned; right down to toothpaste — should not have found parallels eighty years later, on Instagram reels and TikTok. Neither should the domestic bubble that Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) creates for herself and her family feel like a sharp jab at all of us who believe turning a blind eye to news reports will actually serve to make us less complicit with the real injustices of the world around us.

Drawing on History

With characteristic coolness and a calculated restraint, Glazer has two stories unfold simultaneously in The Zone of Interest. One is shown on screen, through the idyllic domesticity of the Höss family as it enjoys idyllic picnics, lounges around the swimming pool in their backyard, and potters around their beautiful home. The other is a story told in sound and silences. When Hedwig’s husband Rudolf (Christian Friedel) comes home, he takes his boots off outside the door. A servant with shorn hair and wearing a patched uniform takes the boots and washes them at an outdoor tap. We see blood spiral down the drain. Throughout the film, under the banal chatter and birdsong, is a soundtrack of mechanical rumblings, orders barked, screams and shouts. Sometimes, the light behind the curtained windows changes colour to glow red. You see, Rudolf is the commandant in charge of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The picture-perfect home in which he lives with Hedwig and their five children shares a boundary wall with the camp. When he stands at the edge of their swimming pool, he looks out at a chimney that’s constantly belching out smoke and flame because of the Jews being executed and burnt at this nightmarish complex. 

Höss is a figure from history. He was the longest-serving commandant at Auschwitz Concentration Camp and in 1844, an operation in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz and killed in 56 days, was named after Höss. Towards the end of The Zone of Interest, Glazer makes it a point to intercut shots of Rudolf Höss leaving work, with images of the museum in Auschwitz in the present. It’s a welcome reminder that despite Rudolf’s best efforts, European Jews survived and the death machinery he took pride in, today stands as a site emblematic of Jewish survival despite the actions of men like Rudolf. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Palestine and the genocides executed since World War II, the symbolism of the museum is up for interpretation. Is it a reminder of the indomitable human spirit or our unwillingness to learn from the past? Or perhaps it’s a pointer to our mulish eagerness to take the wrong message and run with it?   

Violence in the Everyday

More than Rudolf, Glazer focuses on Hedwig in The Zone of Interest, showing how she is actively complicit in the evil designs of genocide despite technically having nothing to do with the functioning of concentration camp. Her possessive delight in her home is built on a foundation of believing in the Nazi ideology that dehumanises the Jews around her. Hüller is magnificent as the hausfrau who takes pride in being the perfect homemaker and by extension, all the acts of cruelty that are necessary to maintain her lifestyle. She’s not unaware of what it takes for her to have the pristine domesticity she so enjoys. At one point, Hedwig lashes out at a domestic help by saying she could have the other woman’s husband turned to ash if she wanted. The power she has as the commandant’s wife is one that Hedwig relishes. 

Both Rudolf and Hedwig choose to ignore toxicity that lurks in their home and finds expression occasionally in the troubled behaviour of their children, like the brother who gets perverse joy in locking up his younger sibling, and the daughter who sleepwalks. In sharp contrast to the Höss home is another one that Glazer shares glimpses off, which is some distance from the concentration camp complex and belongs to a Polish family. In one scene, filmed using thermal imaging, the mother of the household rushes out to the balcony to take in the laundry. There are white flecks visible in the darkness and you might think it’s rain — until you remember that this is thermal imagery and just before coming out, she’d shut windows that looked out into the distance where the fires of Auschwitz could be seen burning. The white flecks are ash, the last traces of those being burnt at the concentration camp.    

The Zone of Interest is a harrowing watch because of the steely composure with which Glazer shows the human capacity for cruelty. He does this without a single scene of graphic violence. Instead, he sows terror through the outstanding sound design by Johnnie Burn, who has recreated the soundscape and noise of the concentration camp using recorded sounds from the present (rather than dipping into an archive or sound bank). It’s terrifying to think drunk revellers in modern-day Reeperbahn or recordings made during recent riots in Paris could be turned into what we hear in The Zone of Interest. Rarely does a film’s sound design leave you with a desperate need for silence, but thanks to Burn’s brilliant inventiveness, even the most banal sounds feel ambiguous and laced with menace.

The true horror lies of The Zone of Interest in the human ability to normalise evil, like the Höss family do in the film, so that it is a simple, unremarkable and accepted fact of their lives. Glazer’s masterstroke is to make The Zone of Interest seem like an easy watch — what could be unsettling about watching a family’s daily rituals? — only to deliver one of the most unsettling and disturbing films you’ll see.