The Zone of Interest Review — A Frighteningly Relevant Study of Detachment and Complicity

Nauseatingly relevant, Glazer’s perturbing masterpiece continues to simmer inside your head long after the credits roll.

Burdened with the unrelenting stress of leadership and bureaucracy, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedl) finds little time to unwind. During a rare lull, he goes with his five children to the riverbank a stone’s throw away from his majestic estate. He notices something mere moments after setting his feet into the water. He sees soot, emanating from the people being exterminated at the very project he heads. This sequence, halfway through veteran filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s first feature film in a decade, is the closest we get to see the extermination of the Jewish people at Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest. And that is precisely the point.

Distributed by A24 and loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest is an unconventional Holocaust tale — one that does not centre on the victims but instead on the perpetrators. Glazer forces us to spend 105 disquieting minutes with Rudolf, commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp, and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) as they strive to fashion the perfect life in their idyllic mansion, surrounded by picturesque stretches of greenery, flowing rivers, and the massive walls of a concentration camp — the perks of Lebensraum.

Initially peripheral, cries of anguish riddled in between persistent gunshots gradually become deafening reminders of the dystopia unravelling within earshot of the Höss’s utopia. Hedwig displays no concern or remorse but only an occasional nonchalant annoyance at this inconvenience, demonstrated through the brilliantly subtle acting that Hüller has come to be known for.

Despite the Höss’s disregard for the reality unravelling next door, the horrors become inescapable, largely through the excellent use of focus and sound. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal employs a plethora of wide shots, always capturing the harrowing reality of what is happening inside the camp, even when it is relegated to the peripheries of both the frame and the Höss’s conscience. Mica Levi’s relentlessly perturbing musical arrangements are visceral and suffocating, and heighten the impact of the film’s challenging themes, making even the most mundane scenes disturbing to witness.

These technical components play a major role in maintaining the film’s intensity and establishing the most important takeaway from Glazer’s modern masterpiece. That the notions of complicity, dehumanisation, and wilful ignorance examined in The Zone of Interest continue to persist today.

Speaking about his fourth feature, Glazer said: “This is not a film about the past. It’s about now and our similarity to the perpetrators, not the victims.” The film finds semblance in the everyday realities of 2024. Palestinians starve under the shadows of bombs and airstrikes in the Gaza Strip as surrounding Israeli villages thrive. The residents of India’s biggest slum are overlooked by the most expensive private residence in the world, in Mumbai. People walk over the homeless as they wither away, all around the world.

We often ask ourselves how people could live without a care in the world as the Holocaust was taking place. Glazer tells us exactly how, in under two hours. Perhaps the most chilling realisation that dawns on you as you witness the disconcerting final scene of The Zone of Interest is that you share more in common with Rudolf and Hedwig than you would like to believe.

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