“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.” -Hannah Arendt
The soundtrack to The Zone of Interest is a cacophony of commotion -gunshots, barking dogs, the occasional distant scream. It permeates the background of so much of the scenes of everyday monotony. It is hideous, uncomfortable, but after a time it becomes merely another facet of this environment; eventually you even start to become used to it -and that is the key to why this movie is so terrifying.
Jonathan Glazer works superbly in the realm of the uncomfortable -to efforts both great (Under the Skin) and dismal (Birth). But each time it is fascinating how effectively he builds an intense and deeply unsettling atmosphere out of deceptively unremarkable contexts. And the subject matter of a book by Martin Amis gave him probably the darkest opportunity for him to cultivate this, but also arguably the most important.
The Zone of Interest is a movie essentially about the banality of evil, as characterized by Hannah Arendt -that cavalier attitude of mundaneness towards committing or upholding atrocities, famously expressed by so many concentration camp commandants during the Nuremberg Trials. It is an unfiltered, unquestioning glimpse at one of the overlooked horrors of the Holocaust -what it revealed about the potentiality of human nature. It is a holocaust movie that glimpses none of the first-hand suffering and yet is far more disturbing than most that do. For in that restraint it forces its audience to consider their own apathy -how much would we care about evil, if we couldn’t see it? In our modern confrontations with it, do we?
The movie centres on the family of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz. They live in a warped impression of an idyllic home, matriarch Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller) tending to the housekeeping and entertaining visitors while the children often play in the yard -a yard that abruptly ends at a big wall on the other side of which are things the children can only vaguely contemplate, all context imparted to them by parents reading them children’s stories at bed with fascist themes or through the toys or clothes they receive plundered from some Jewish family. In one chilling scene late in the movie, the older brother -who understands some specificity of what his father does though without truly grasping it- ‘plays’ with his younger sibling by tricking him into the small family greenhouse, locking it …and then makes hissing sounds over his brother’s protestations.
It’s a perfect example of how Glazer provokes in deceptively inauspicious ways. The Zone of Interest is littered with small moments reinforcing just how little concern these Nazis have with the travesties they are inflicting. How fundamentally normal they have made it for themselves, and for their families. It goes well beyond the typical gleeful or maniacal depictions of these most ubiquitous of pop culture villains; even the images of sadists conjured by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino. In showcasing them within the vein of monotony, with motivations related to job insecurity or keeping the family together with an everyday glimmer to it, Glazer dares to make his Nazis relatable. And it’s not out of any kind of sympathy that he draws an authentic relationship between Rudolf and Hedwig or characterizes the children with a grounded naiveté; it is to emphasize the capacity for terror hidden within the ordinary -how easy it is for evil to be normalized.
An early moment that really resonates on this level, is of Rudolf consulting with some colleagues in a very businesslike manner -indeed Glazer shoots the whole exchange to feel like any office scene- when the subject is on the efficiency of gas chambers. The men talk casually and with a dissonant curiosity whilst poring over schematics -as if it were a mere architectural project- all the while referring to the difference in “load” capacity and the time taken to complete its objective. Later we see him nonchalantly puffing a cigarette in his yard while an ominous plume of smoke rises from the distance behind him. It is the kind of thing that disturbs Hedwig’s mother a tad, but her daughter pays it no mind -too busy modelling the dresses looted from a Jewish woman’s home.
The twisted flavour of their domesticity here is like a sick joke on an audience familiar with the motions of cinematic narrative. Consider how Hedwig’s desire for Rolf to stay at Auschwitz and her fantasy for them to be farmers after the war is played with the same sincerity as would be found in an innocent drama about someone pining for their ambitions. Or how Rolf's confession over the phone that while at a Berlin party he instinctively imagined gassing everyone in the room is relayed with the same air of nothing that any other movie might pass off as just an everyman distracted by work. Glazer has his actors, both of whom are terrifically vile, tone down their charisma in these instances, but crucially keep it from being muted outright. The characters are still to be read as human -apart from the uniform, as people we might know.
Glazer shoots the film eerily, allowing the compositions of an idyll just over the hedge from horror to stay in your mind. The film is mostly made up of static shots or carefully lateral camera movements, figures and subjects framed rarely at more than a medium, though with certain key exceptions -a close-up on a red flower for instance. He uses this dash of colour in much the same way as Spielberg had, in contrast to the muted tones found all around -evocative of the deadness of atmosphere. One series of sequences, perhaps the movie’s only refuge of hope, is shot in negative -as though being insidiously observed: a Polish girl who sneaks food onto the work sites or in one instance down the chimneys of the buildings where the captives are held. Even her efforts may be in vain though -as Nazi soldiers are seen running a plough-horse right over the ripe apples.
Though there is a degree of speculation in this and other scenes of the movie (including an ellipses of a galling sexual scene that ends in Rudolf furiously washing his genitals in secret) -all of them frightfully authentic in capturing the reprehensible nuances of Nazi ideology and its sheer coldness of execution, the film is set subtly against the backdrop of real events. Specifically the Final Solution lingers ominously in the background -Rudolf's story arc as it were is about earning the massive influx of Hungarian Jews for himself and Auschwitz. Several scenes show him on the phone with superiors making the case for his record and the apparent reputation of his concentration camp. Of course he gets his wish. The last scenes of the movie are the most tangibly haunting, as Glazer once again through chilling juxtaposition emphasizes the horror we do not see, coupled with an indictment on not just the antipathy of the Nazis but the modern world's own mundane relationship to the Holocaust. Has its reality been normalized for us as well? By extent, what other evils have been?
Before focusing on a scene of a Nazi family casually swimming on an afternoon, The Zone of Interest opens with a petrifying overture by Mica Levi over a black screen. This uneasy emptiness forces the audience to sit in trepidation, to not look but merely project onto the screen what evil they imagine. And then the movie proceeds to challenge them on what evil really looks like, what moral cost there is to not seeing it; to have them truly understand the horror of the piece, of the Nazis, of the Holocaust. In peeling back the veneer of what so many think they see and understand of fascism, The Zone of Interest reveals its true shocking colours; and by virtue how unnervingly familiar they are.
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