Movie Review: 'The Zone of Interest' is Haunting and Horrifying

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Directed by Jonathan Glazer

Written by Jonathan Glazer

Starring Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel

Release Date December 15th, 2023

Published December 26th, 2023

The Zone of Interest is a devastating work of art. It's an unflinching and horrific movie but not because it depicts the holocaust in any direct fashion. Rather, The Zone of Interest places the horrors in your mind all while an affluent family headed up by the Nazi Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp goes through the daily routines of your average suburban family. It's the casualness of it all that drills the horror of the holocaust into your subconscious. I should not have been so gobsmacked by seeing the family of a Nazi casually carrying on as if what their father does is just like any other job but it just kept hitting me again and again how horrific and absurd this all is. The normalization of the systematic murder of six million people leads you the revelation of how we normalize the horrors of the world every time we turn a blind eye to suffering and death.

The Zone of Interest centers its story on Commandant Rudolph Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller). As he goes off to work, she attends to the house staff and gets the kids off to school. It's all so familiar and normal. You see this tableau unfold in every suburb. Except for the part where Rudolph is wearing a crisply detailed Nazi uniform and is walking next door to his job as the commandant at Auschwitz where he's charged with finding the most efficient way to murder Jewish people while keeping just enough of them alive for slave labor for the camp or industry. His approach to his job is no different from your average middle manager holding meetings with higher ups while filing efficiency reports on the number of people he's able to brutally murder.

Meanwhile, his wife is entertaining friends and family in their well appointed home. The film unfolds a number of callous and cruel scenes as packages are delivered to the home and it slowly dawns on us that the various pieces of clothing and personal items are those of Jewish people being murdered next door. For example, Hedwig receives a package containing a mink coat. She tries it on and poses in front of a mirror. She finds a lipstick in the pocket and starts applying it. She's as carefree as if she'd just purchased these items and they belong to her. If she cares at all where these items came from or how she's taking things that belonged to people her husband is murdering, you can't see it on her face or in her eyes. There is a sociopathic level of not caring in Hedwig. Her sense of cruel entitlement is soul shaking for anyone with a conscience.

In a later scene, Hedwig's mother comes to visit and they have a conversation about a former neighbor, an elderly Jewish woman. The conversation casually discussed the woman's curtains and how the mother envied those curtains before wondering if the woman had been murdered next door. The mother indicates that she's far more upset that she wasn't the one to end up with those curtains than she's bothered by the fate of her former neighbor. Director Jonathan Glazer does not flinch in his presentation of these scenes. The mundanity of this conversation, the casual disregard for the lives of Jewish people chilled my spine and that's the point. If you don't find this monstrous, there is something horrifically wrong with you, just as there is something absolutely wrong with these characters.

I could talk about numerous haunting scenes in The Zone of Interest but you get the point. The sound design of the film with pops of gunfire and the pained cries of families being separated and or slaughtered keeps the tension of The Zone of Interest constant. Family gatherings take place over this soundtrack of guns and terror. The visual elements of a family and friends sharing casual drinks in a well appointed backyard while puffs of smoke rise in the background cause your stomach to turn and rage to boil in your veins. All the while, the only conflict for the family comes when Rudolph is promoted for doing such a good job of killing people, meaning that the family might have to leave their mansion directly next to Auschwitz, something unthinkable to Hedwig. She can't imagine living anywhere other than in shouting distance of people being shot, gassed, and burned in ovens, their remains interrupting a casual family fishing trip as they float down a nearby creek.

The impersonal direction of The Zone of Interest is intentional. Glazer is not inviting you to become intimately familiar with this family. He's presenting them as plainly possible while you fill in the horror of their complete lack of care for where they are or what they are a party to. There is no entry character, no one to provide a perspective for you or identify with. It's a family of cold hearted monsters and children who, perhaps just don't understand the magnitude of what is happening around them. The children are left as blank slates onto which Rudolph and Hedwig project their monstrous carelessness, never letting on regarding how horrifically wrong what they are doing is.

It's not just about the holocaust however as The Zone of Interest is intended to implicate everyone who is capable of turning a savage blind eye to suffering and death. We're all complicit. We all excuse horrors every single day so that we can keep living the lives we want to live. In America, children starve, cancer patients work two jobs to pay for chemotherapy, and on a world level we try not to look at Ukraine or Gaza where men, women, and children are treated as collateral damage among world powers playing games of Risk with real human lives at stake and suffering from every decision or lack thereof on the part of world leaders searching for ways to capitalize on the suffering. No one gets out of The Zone of Interest clean, not me, not you, not anyone. That's what gives the film its resonance and unrelenting power.

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