They appear to be any family at first, having a picnic by a lake, with mom and dad frolicking around with the five children before paddling back to their opulent home for dad’s birthday supper. However, “The Zone of Interest,” a stunning work of cinema currently showing in theaters, is about more than just people. People who choose to live in denial are living in a horror show.
Completely brainwashed Nazis are Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their kids. Höss served as the actual Auschwitz commandant from 1940 to 1943. His family lived next to the death camp, blocking out the sounds of the gunfire, the barbed wire, the screams of the Jewish prisoners, and the crematorium’s offending smoke.
The British writer and director of this incredibly unsettling film, directed by Jonathan Glazer and filmed on location in Poland, dramatizes what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil” to characterize the deluded soldiers who heedlessly obey Hitler’s orders, rather than showing us anything inside the camp.
When Glazer opens his film on a pitch-black screen and keeps it there until Mica Levi’s menacing, brilliant score begins to play, we start to tremble in anticipation of what’s to come.
Knowing all too well that antisemitism is on the rise again, the Jewish Glazer declared, “Nazism took hold like a fever and it’s happening again.” Even though the movie is loosely based on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, it takes a different approach by employing real names and avoiding specifics about the Holocaust, which only serves to heighten the terrifying terror that lurks so close.
After the brilliant films “Under the Skin,” “Birth,” and “Sexy Beast,” Glazer’s fourth and best picture to date is “The Zone of Interest.” He is clearly an artist as the Höss family goes about their daily lives. When Hedwig threatens a Jewish maid or the oldest son plays with a collection of teeth, disgust creeps in. She will “have my husband spread your ashes” across the fields if you cross her.
Friedel delves even further, uncovering the poisonous heart of Rudolf as he advances through the ranks by creating quicker methods for annihilating Jews. Humanity is the first victim in the eyes of this death merchant who is working with Nazi bureaucrats. The camera catches the commandant vomiting by himself on a stairwell, but his body speaks a different story than his unwavering focus.
Glazer never lets up. Unlike the movie “Schindler’s List” title character played by Steven Spielberg, there is no “good German.” There is no Anne Frank to give the Jews in “The Zone of Interest” hope or a reminder that “people really are good at heart.” Jews continue to exist in shadows, as though the scope of their fate was too great for a single movie.
A good point. However, it’s also accurate to say that Glazer has an unwavering moral grasp of the subject. Who says this place is immune to it? It has happened before and if we don’t stay alert, it might happen again. “The Zone of Interest” is a terrifying film that is difficult to watch but impossible to forget. It is a wake-up call straight out of hell. It is dangerous if we ignore it.
