The Zone of Interest analysis — A moment of art in an artless film

I saw this movie last night in a lightly occupied theater and I would like to take some time to talk about the experience of watching it and what one can get from seeing this movie. Spoilers ahead, but I will say that the movie is exactly what you expect it to be if you simply read the pitch for it. My fiance wanted to see this movie, I had never heard of it, and when I asked her what it was about she told me that it was about a family that lived outside a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. She said, “They never see any Jews though, they just hear them.”

Now you know everything that happens in the movie. That is not a criticism though, it is just a note of my experience watching the movie. Of course, there is a plot, but I think it is there just to be insulting to the viewer. Yes, this movie is an insult; I think it is supposed to be. It is insulting because of a detail I left out: The subjects of the film are the family of Rudolf Höss, who was the Nazi commandant responsible for running Auschwitz.

What do I mean by the movie is insulting? Well, I would explain by asking you to imagine the concept of this story being told to someone.

I would like to make a story about Auschwitz.

Great idea, there were over a million killed in that camp and it would be noble to show and discuss the horrors they were faced with and remember their stories.

No. I am not going to show any of that. In fact, that part of the story is just going to be a background setting for the real story.

What story?

I would like to tell the story of this unbothered family that lives outside of the worst death camp in World War II.

What story could you tell about them that anyone would care about or take seriously?

Let's make the plot about the wife’s struggle to make a garden and how she and her husband get separated during the war.

You’re kidding, right?

No. That really is the plot. The wife cries by the river about her husband leaving and her being separated from her beautiful garden, while in the background you hear a gunshot, screams, pounding of hammers, factory work, beatings, and more screams, all very faint, and taking up all of your attention. My fiance compared it to Parasite (2019), but I think the difference is that Zone of Interest is more about the viewer than the characters. In one of the best scenes of Parasite, we see Ki Taek driving around his rich boss, who talks about how nice it was that it rained the previous night, as she plans a party in the backseat. She says this not knowing or caring that her chauffeur had his whole house flooded and destroyed by the storm last night.

Here is the difference between how Parasite tells its story and The Zone of Interest does. In Parasite, the camera focuses on the face of the actor Ho Song. His reaction to the insult, his recognition of the unfairness and irony, and his resentment building towards the privileged woman. The characters in the film see how tone-deaf she is; the movie is focused on telling the story of Ki Taek, and the audience is focused on how he is affected by the disparity between these two classes of people.

In Zone of Interest, we see a wall. There is no attention given to the victims of the camp. There is no room for them in the film with how much it focuses on the main characters, they are reduced to background noise. To emphasize this disparity, the movie shows how the family’s lives are incredibly mundane, the whole movie feels like it’s just filling its space with nothing but routine and mildly interesting activities. They lie in bed and talk, the wife shows her mother the garden, the father goes on a canoe with his kids, and cheats on his wife. Its not shown though, he goes into a room with a woman, it cuts to him cleaning up after everything, he doesn’t look happy or lively. Notice that even in the photo from the movie, there is no saturation. The poster makes it look more colorful than it is, I noticed while watching that every shot was basically still, from a distance, and there was hardly any color in in every frame.

There is nothing of interest to be found in these people. Any story that they could tell or that you could tell about them is not as interesting as what is happening behind the wall in their backyard. Their dialogue was read by my eyes and then it fell directly out of my ears because it is simply impossible to focus on or care about when your whole mind is occupied by the background of the movie. They have no redeeming qualities, no creativity, and nothing to empathize with in their characters. They are products of fascism, they seek to serve the State with no individuality and no moral authority outside of the State. As Mussolini wrote:

“Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of that abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic Liberalism, Fascism is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.”

Fascism destroys all creativity, and all individuality, and reframes everything in life to serve the state. Even when the parents talk about raising their children, it is to serve the country as good citizens do, not to be good parents in service of their children. Obviously, this is how fascists think, and it makes watching a movie about them as mundane as their lives are. No spirit, no art, nothing that doesn’t serve the purpose of the State. However, there is one scene, where you are spared watching the family’s monopoly on this movie’s runtime, and where you are given a glimpse of what you have been longing to see and hear. It is a short scene, and watching it makes you wish the whole movie was about this one part. We see a girl find a song written by a prisoner in the camp. She plays it on the piano. It is genuine, heartbreaking, and beautiful. Even in hell, the prisoners have souls that burn to be free, and creativity that allows them to make moving pieces of art. Nothing else in the movie has your attention so fully. A voice is finally given to the oppressed people, the Ki Taek of this movie, and you see how insulting it is to them that we are forced to watch their oppressors complain about the flower bushes being trampled, compared to what they are going through.

This movie is about the concept more than the plot, and that's how I see it. It is a concept of a movie more than an actual movie. The question to ask about this movie isn’t what, but why? Why would this movie get made? Why would this be the story you would want to tell about the Holocaust? I think the answer lies in the final scene.

The Zone of Interest — Ending scene explained

At the end of the movie, the husband gets restationed and promoted, and he begins to go back to see his family. He stops on a staircase and begins to cough and gag when suddenly we are shown images of a cleaning service going through the Auschwitz museum in the modern day. They clean the glass case that houses the pile of shoes belonging to those who died at the camp. They vacuum the floor next to the incinerator. As I watched, my first reaction was to think that it was a parallel to how the Höss family lived: Look at these people, just going through the motions, not stopping to be horrified at the atrocities that took place right where they are standing. Is this supposed to be commenting on how the holocaust has faded into the background of modern society? Then I thought of how stupid that sounds. It's a museum devoted to those who died, and these people are giving their labor to it in order to preserve it. Then I thought about Rudolph Höss, the disgusting man, he attends a party and his mind is occupied by how he could gas everyone in the room. His life is boring, his character is uninteresting, and the most he can contribute to a conversation is a discussion on the logistics of how to more efficiently murder people in service to the state. Even his wife is uninterested by his thoughts and his conversation, and the audience has just had to sit and watch him go through the motions of bureaucracy and ruthlessness for an hour and 45 minutes. He is dying now probably as a result of inhaling all of the ash he lives next to, and there will be no monument to remember him by. Instead, the museum will be dedicated to preserving everything that was touched by the people he killed, and his life will be the least interesting part of a movie about him and his family, in which all of your attention will be devoted to every background sound you can pick up on in the theater. This is his monument, and I think that the purpose of the movie is to demystify the life of the Nazis and to show how horrible and disturbing their lives were. The ending of the movie is just showing how dedicated we are to remembering the victims, and that- forgive my cringe- Nazis suck.

Thank you for reading. I have more to say about this movie, particularly the role of the mother who comes to visit the family, but maybe I will write it another time. If you have a different interpretation or experience of this movie, please write a comment and let me know, and if you haven’t seen it, I would say it is worth watching, but I will warn you, it's pretty boring when the nazis are on screen, even though I think that is the point.

-Jared