Jonathan Glazer’s an interesting fellow. In twenty-four years, he’s made four features aside from countless commercials and music videos. His films have ranged from violent gangster comedy to metaphysical what-ifs to aliens walk among us horror. I count the latter among the best films of the 2010s.
So it was with no small amount of excitement that I anticipated Glazer’s latest, ten years on from Under the Skin. The Zone of Interest is a German-language film set in Poland during World War II, as far from the sun-drenched Cockney mafia of Sexy Beast as you can get, and miles removed from the austere Manhattan winterscape of Birth. But that’s fitting for Glazer, whose work regularly defies categorization. After casting Natasha Romanoff as a man-devouring extraterrestrial prowling the streets of Glasgow, an adaptation of Martin Amis’ 2014 “zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological” best-seller seems as logical a move as any.
Spoilers for The Zone of Interest follow.
Despite its Oscar nominations, I don’t think a lot of people are going to see Zone [ed. note: and wins, for Best International Feature and Best Sound]. It is, first and foremost, a Holocaust film, albeit one that approaches the subject in a way that feels fresh and new. Which is to say, this is not Schindler’s List, and that’s a good thing. There’s no straightforward story, and little to no character development; what happens onscreen is restricted to mundane, day-to-day activities.
The film is mostly set in and around a house belonging to Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller), and their five children. The house sits directly across the street from the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where Höss served as commandant from 1940-43 and 1944-45. As the family goes about its day, tending to vegetables and flowers, lounging in the pool or down by a river, entertaining guests and enjoying birthday parties, people are being gassed, burned, shot, and tortured next door. And while Zone shows none of the depravity usually depicted in Holocaust films, we hear it, all of it, courtesy a nightmarish soundscape by Johnnie Burn.
The film steers clear of emotion, never instructing its audience how to feel. The electronic score by Mica Levi (who created Under the Skin’s soundtrack) only creeps in at select moments. The camera follows the characters but keeps its distance, the result of an ingenious, surveillance-like setup by DP Łukasz Żal. And while there’s family drama, it’s of the garden variety: dad’s getting transferred out of town, mom wants to stay and plant, kids fight and lock each other in the greenhouse.
And yet there are plenty of indicators that something is off. Early on, women in the house divvy up a pile of clothing they obtained, and later, Hedwig tries on a fur coat and applies lipstick. Needless to say, the clothing is not theirs. The walls are topped with barbed wire, and active smokestacks can be seen in the distance. Standing in the river by his home, Höss discovers human remains. And in one of the film’s few nods to the characters’ barbarity, it is strongly implied that Höss is sexually assaulting one of his Jewish housemaids.
At this point, you may be tempted to shout out, Stop right there, chief. I know the answer. The Zone of Interest is horror.
Well, it is and it isn’t.
First, due to the flat cinematography and quotidian goings-on, much of the film is, well, dull. I understand this is by design, and I get the intention. Banal evil is not exciting. It’s people living their lives, aware of the atrocities but compartmentalizing them so they can go on living. When Hedwig argues that she doesn’t want to lose the life she and Rudolph have built, she’s fighting to remain in a house across the street from a death factory. As long as she can harvest her kohlrabi, she’s happy.
Second, stories about the Holocaust may be horrible, but they’re not usually horror — at least not by the traditional definition of the genre. The three most acclaimed films about the period, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and Life is Beautiful, are dramas. Some would say, and I don’t think this is controversial, that just as we’ve become numb to violence onscreen, Holocaust imagery has been “played out” in popular culture. Nazis will always make for suitable villains, as Steven Spielberg, John Schlesinger, and Quentin Tarantino have shown. But Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marathon Man, and Inglorious Basterds are not Holocaust films, not by a long shot.
To bring across what was truly monstrous about the Holocaust, one must turn to French documentaries like Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog or Claude Laznmann’s 8-hour Shoah. As hard as they are to watch, however, they wouldn’t be considered horror.
A still from NIGHT AND FOG depicting a SS commandant at home with his wife and dog.
Which brings us to The Zone of Interest.
Glazer has said his film’s intention is to show our similarities to the perpetrators, not the victims. The film’s lack of drama solidifies the point. Watching it out of context, you could argue it’s a slice-of-life portrait of one family’s lovely summer. Whether they’re frolicking in the pool or galloping on horseback, there’s no question that the Höss family is enjoying themselves. When Rudolph is transferred to faraway Oranienburg, his days are numbingly rote; we watch him move one from one meeting to the next, and to a party celebrating his recent promotion. But it’s not enough: all he wants to do is get back to his beloved Auschwitz.
Look under the hood: you’ll find the horror, and understand why Zone is unlike any Holocaust film that has preceded it. With no glimpses of life inside the camp, we’re left to focus on those who justify their existence outside it. Höss’ promotion is based on his skill running a forced labor camp in which Jews will soon be murdered by the hundreds of thousands. His meetings concern the design of crematoria and the transport of Jews from Hungarian cities. And yet it could be a day at Dunder Mifflin, pushing paper, crunching numbers, taking memos.
Burn’s sound design, in concert with Levi’s score, is the true star of the film. It’s not often that I urge anyone to see a film in the theater, but do yourselves a favor: see this in the theater. If you watch it at home, do so with decent headphones. The sound — trains, gunshots, screams, orders being barked by the SS — is half of the film, maybe more.
The horror of The Zone of Interest isn’t supernatural, paranormal, or spectral. It’s not aliens inhabiting human bodies or transdimensional beings ravaging local supermarkets. It’s not serial killers terrorizing teenagers with knives. It is the very human capacity to ignore, rationalize, and contain the worst in ourselves.
Is The Zone of Interest horror? I’m going to say yes. As glacial as the pacing may be, you will be shaken by Glazer’s vision of life going on while, feet away, life is being snuffed out.
Eric Winick