As Nazi Germany lay in ruins following World War II, long-serving Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss scoffed at accusations that he had murdered three and a half million people. “No, only two and one half million,” he calmly protested. “The rest died from disease and starvation.”
The chillingly mundane domestic lives of Höss and his family lie at the centre of The Zone of Interest, British writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s first feature in a decade. Hannah Arendt’s over-used quote about the banality of evil is guaranteed to come up in almost every review, but that is understandable, as few films have so perfectly embodied the concept before. A formally austere portait of Auschwitz that never goes inside the camps, leaving the horror and suffering off screen, the Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004) director’s fourth full-length work is a coolly detached, unsentimental, unflinching glimpse of Hell with overtones of Michael Haneke. Not exactly a fun watch, but serious and compelling.
Titled after the euphemistic Nazi term for the network of forced labour and extermination camps around Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest is freely adapted from the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. But where Amis used a fictionalised version of Höss as one of several narrators, Glazer has created a forensically researched, tightly focussed, quasi-documentary portrait of the real man and his family. As with his previous feature, the mind-bending sci-fi classic Under The Skin (2013), the arty British auteur has radically condensed his source novel into a gripping, unsettling, visually dazzling psycho-thriller. Premiering in competition in Cannes, this left-field masterpiece already feels like a strong contender for the Palme d’Or.
The Zone of Interest announces its uncompromising agenda from the start with an extended shot of an all-black screen and a disquieting burst of sinister avant-choral music from score composer Mica Levi, who also did tremendous work on Under The Skin. The scenes that follow have a deceptively sweet pastoral flavour as Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, of Toni Erdmann fame) and their five children enjoy lakeside picnics, river swims, garden parties and more. The only jarring note in this otherwise idyllic Sound of Music picture is the vast cluster of prison-like buildings stretching to infinity just beyond the family’s ornamental garden wall.
While Höss and Hedwig busy themselves with birthday parties, flower arrangements and holiday plans, they somehow tune out a steady low-level background soundtrack of screams and shootings, plumes of steam from trains arriving at the camps, and ominous columns of fiery ash belching from distant crematoria chimneys. Glazer says a key theme of the film is “ambient genocide”, the human ability to compartmentalise away complicity, focussing on minor personal concerns despite a nagging awareness of monumental crimes against humanity happening just out of shot.
The Zone of Interest has a very striking look, largely thanks to Glazer’s radical filming concept. In tandem with Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who previously worked on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), the director fitted out the house set with dozens of cameras, observing the action remotely on multiple screens. He mostly uses static, highly composed middle-distance shots under only natural lighting, which helps explain why these domestic scenes have such unforced naturalism. The idea, Glazer says, was to make these Nazi protagonists disturbingly relatable to modern viewers, not monsters safely confined to history.
In sharp stylistic contrast, Glazer also includes eye-catching short interludes filmed with monochrome thermal imaging, in which a Polish partisan woman sneaks out at night to leave clandestine food gifts for the slave labourers forced to work by the Nazis. Based on real accounts, these visually arresting scenes have some of the surreal, alien beauty that defined Under The Skin. Short bursts of saturated single-colour screens are also sparingly but effectively deployed. More of these semi-abstract visual digressions, plus a little more explanatory context, could have elevated the film’s already strong aesthetic choices.
The Zone of Interest is not a straight critique of Nazi evil, though it does feature some quietly chilling moments. Hedwig relishes modelling clothes looted from murdered Jewish camp inmates, and casually warns her unpaid Polish servant that she could have the girl reduced to ashes any time. That said, most of the genocidal references are carefully masked in neutral, businesslike language, which only render their opaque meaning more menacing. Meanwhile, Höss is chiefly concerned with his career rise through the Nazi party, and Hedwig remains fiercely attached to their dream home project, blissly unperturbed by its proximity to a massive death camp.
The precisely controlled tone of The Zone of Interest wobbles a little in its later stages when Höss is temporarily recalled to Germany, diluting the pleasing purity of the exquisitely shot domestic setting and pressure-cooker family dynamic. A time-jumping cut-away incorporating recent documentary footage shot at the Auschwitz museum is a bold touch, but slightly jarring and fuzzy in intent.
In fairness, Glazer is not interested in standard biopic tropes, preferring to drop cryptic clues and glitchy visual allusions, leaving viewers to do their own research into how life turned out for the real Höss after his long tenure at Auschwitz. Here’s a hint: pretty badly. Concluding with another rousing blast of Mica Levi’s majestically dissonant, pitch-bending, nerve-jangling score, The Zone of Interest is a gloriously original work and a boldly experimental addition to the canon of high-calibre Holocaust cinema.
Director, screenwriter: Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Medusa Knopf, Daniel Holzberg, Sascha Maaz, Max Beck, Wolfgang Lampl, Johann Karthaus, Ralph Herforth, Freya Kreutzkam, Lilli Falk
Cinematography: Lukasz Zal
Editing: Paul Watts
Music: Mica Levi
Production designer: Chris Oddy
Producers: James Wilson, Ewa Puszczynska
Production companies: A24 (US), Extreme Emotions (US), Film4 (UK)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In German
106 minutes
