‘The Zone of Interest’ review: Jonathan Glazer’s latest is emotionally bruising

The Zone of Interest (2023) is a loose adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel, which used fictional characters as opposed to writer and director Jonathan Glazer’s choice to use real-life historical figures as the starting point for his characters. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum provided Glazer with testimonies from survivors and others who worked in Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss’ household. Glazer used this research to flesh out the characters and situations in his film. Beginning during the summer of 1943, the film shows a seemingly ordinary family with five children living their dream life except that their home is on the grounds of the most notorious Nazi extermination camp on the eve of its height of mass extermination. 

The Zone of Interest focuses on the Hoss family’s home life. Hoss’ wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller, who is having a banner year after also appearing in Anatomy of a Fall), dominates the first two-thirds of the film as she manages the servants, oversees maintenance of the grounds, especially the garden, greenhouse and pool area, and acts as the gracious hostess looking for any excuse to preen before visitors.

Hedwig is proud of her work, making the perfect home. She loves her husband’s station because of the perks of getting more help around the house, first dibs on claiming prisoners’ belongings and being able to psychologically terrorize those workers when she has a bad day. The camp is a feature, not a flaw, of her perfect life. The appropriate parallel to Hedwig is that of a plantation owner’s wife in the Antebellum South. Though, the only difference would be that enslaved people would not have anything that Hedwig could steal that she did not already own. 

Hedwig has an insatiable appetite for more and flirts with her husband (Christian Freidel) every night to wheedle more privileges from his position while he is focused on his work. They are a happy couple, but it is conditional on the privileges of his position. Despite Hedwig’s girlish pride and joy in her estate, there are signs that the ghoulish surroundings have a deleterious effect on the family’s well-being. The incessant crying of baby Annagret (Kalman Wilson), a housekeeper drinking throughout the night and ignoring Annagret, and one of the twin girls sleepwalking signals that this ideal family life does not work for everyone, and enveloping death puts a subdued strain on the house’s inhabitants. 

The home, Hedwig’s only true love, is nearly another character in The Zone of Interest. Eagle-eyed viewers who are not just watching the family but are looking at each frame’s edges will start to notice that this home is not timeless, though its décor is classic, but rooted in a specific time and place. There are huge walls surrounding the house, but at an opening of the wall, an occasional person clad in a Nazi or prisoner uniform will appear on the edges or enter the grounds. Most of the action is well-lit or set in the daytime with nothing out of focus. Glazer makes conscious choices of what he wants his viewers to see; in this case, it’s to focus on a family, the supposed wholesome microcosm of broader society, and their reaction to the pain and death of scores of people. 

Glazer only shows and refuses to rely on dialogue to spoon-feed his audience with explanations of what they are seeing. The Zone of Interest may be too subtle for some viewers, who are more accustomed to gorging on visible, graphic suffering to uncover their remote empathy. A banquet of death and pain may have the opposite effect. Viewers can become desensitized to seeing others’ pain and frame the events as something foreign to themselves. This film forces viewers to reflect on the ultimate callous people, a family of Nazis, and compare how the viewer may be like them. Have you become as indifferent as them? Have you benefited from the quotidian, epic anguish that surrounds you?

When Glazer does depict abuse, he focuses on the way that Hedwig speaks to her targets, specifically a couple of enslaved Jewish housekeepers who are otherwise visually indistinguishable from the rest of the household. When he captures the abuse, it is to show how Hedwig is not ignorant of her husband’s state-sanctioned murder but uses it as leverage to bolster her ego when she is having a bad day. She is kicking the metaphorical dog while the actual dog receives better treatment. Glazer does not linger on the housekeepers’ pain; because all the horrors occur in the open and in the light without shame, the Jewish housekeepers’ valor is depicted like a photograph negative, capturing their anonymous, nocturnal good deeds to help their fellow prisoners.

To capture the scope of this destruction, Glazer uses fire and smoke. A trail of smoke indicates a train’s arrival implying the cargo of innocent human beings treated worse than cattle driven to the slaughter. A pillar of smoke and fire in the distance reflects Nazis using a furnace to burn bodies, which belches smoke and ash, the atomized bodies of Hoss’ victims who find vengeance in death by choking their murderers. The pollution of murdering tons of human beings affects everyone nearby, especially their ability to breathe, including the murderers.

Hoss describes the place as a perfect environment for children despite this threat to their health. Normal-sized furnaces are used to burn a personal letter with unpleasant news, a silent, implied condemnation from an initially approving houseguest whose conscience gets awakened. Nightly Hoss reads the Hansel and Gretel fairytale to his girls, particularly the denouement when Gretel throws the cannibal witch into the oven, which reflects his rationalizing his action. Hoss sees himself as defending his children from an imagined evil, but Glazer counters by showing the heroic actions of the Jewish housekeeper as the Gretel trying to keep people alive. The only homicidal cannibal and agent of evil is Hoss. Glazer uses sound and light, film’s basic building blocks, to puncture the almost documentary-style realism of the film to explain the emotional tone.

Glazer is unflinching with his use of diegetic sound, especially the prisoners’ screams. As The Zone of Interest unfolds, the screams seep into every moment and become impossible to ignore. Eventually, the words embedded in the cacophony are easier to distinguish, a harrowing revelation. It makes the family’s indifference more disturbing. In one scene, the hum of the bees lingering on flowers accompanies the screams until the screen turns red, evoking blood, then returns to silence. By using sound to convey violence, the film does not further brutalize or exploit the prisoners. When chronicling hateful acts of violence, using abstractions such as sound and light dodges the danger of the audience consuming violence like entertainment and potentially receiving the wrong message. 

The Zone of Interest editorializes with its use of contrasting abstract moments that interrupt the otherwise conventional still shots of the home, its grounds, and the family’s leisure time in the country and on the nearby river. During the beginning of the film, you may wonder if something is wrong with the projector. After the film’s title appears in bright white words, they gradually dim into complete darkness with only the sounds of a bucolic countryside accompanying Mica Levi’s haunting, dissonant score. Glazer leaves the audience in the dark for a beat too long.

The end also uses lighting to symbolize Hoss’ descent into evil. As he plunges into darkness, The Zone of Interest nearly turns into a black and white film. A spot of light acts as a wormhole transporting viewers into the future to reveal present day Museum’s exhibits dedicated to the innocent victims of Hoss’ crimes. It is also the only time that Freidel’s performance as Hoss transcends time and is not rooted in response to Hoss’ immediate surroundings. Freidel acts as if Hoss suddenly had a physical, visceral insight into how people in the future would judge him or how he should judge himself. It is Glazer’s only moment to indulge in the fantasy of Hoss getting a taste of his own medicine.

The Zone of Interest has some flaws. While there are numerous scenes devoted to the Hoss family behaving like vultures and sorting through prisoners’ belongings, it was far more systemized, massive in terms of volume and less improvisational than Glazer depicted. Lucy Adlington, author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, explores how girls and women survived because their forced labor was eventually restricted to being seamstresses in the Upper Tailoring Studio, which Hedwig started after a scene that Glazer depicts when she finds a fur coat that needs repair. 

Finally, the now deceased Jutta Gerendas, the child of a Nazi official who worked in Japan, dedicated her entire existence to rejecting her father’s legacy. After WWII ended, she explained that when people were not around who could be victimized without repercussions, Germans would treat each other quite cruelly, which parallels accounts of how white people treated each other in the Antebellum South according to the autobiography Twelve Years a Slave. Gerendas’ father abused her. Glazer showed that the Hoss family life was free from abuse other than an older brother locking his little brother on a cold day in a greenhouse; however, cruelty does not usually stop at the doormat. Viciousness knows no limits.

The Zone of Interest is in theaters now. Watch the trailer below.

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Images courtesy of A24