OSCARS 2024: The Zone of Interest (2023)

When Jamiroquai's music video for “Virtual Insanity” hit, it was evident that the director was someone special. Jonathan Glazer immediately became a favorite of film fans the world over but he takes his time with his project. It's been a decade since his last movie, cosmic horror film “Under the Skin” that wowed many and baffled others. In all that time, there's been rumblings that Glazer's next film would be an adaptation of Martin Amis' Holocaust novel, “The Zone of Interest.” In 2019, Glazer would team with A24 and a number of other production companies in order to finally realize the project. The resulting film has been maybe the most critically acclaimed and audacious work of Glazer's lauded career. The Academy has recognized the achievement, giving Glazer his first Best Director and Best Picture nods. 

The year is 1943 and the Nazis' Final Solution is well underway. Just outside the walls of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp resides a home. Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss lives there with his wife, Helga, and their five children. The family goes for swims in the near-by river, the father goes fishing. Helga tends to a garden and a group of servants prepare birthday parties and special dinners. All the while, countless lives are ended and countless more people are put through Hell on earth just on the other side of a wall. Höss and his family carry on, going about their daily lives without any concern for the horrors going on just a few feet away from them at any given time.

Most movies about the Holocaust plunge us right into the misery of the genocide, showing us people surviving or struggling one of the most horrifying events in European history. Much has already been written about how “The Zone of Interest” differs in its approach. Glazer and his team keep everything we typically associate with the Holocaust off-screen. Instead, we simply hear everything. Gun shots. Screams. Trains pulling in. The ever-present rumbling of the furnaces. “The Zone of Interest” is not about surviving the Holocaust. Instead, it's about presenting a society totally complacent in the faces of these horrors. “The Zone of Interest” is blatantly about how people can turn their backs on atrocious human suffering. Helga complains about having her pleasant home life interrupted when Rudolph is tasked with operations in Hungary. The kids have parties, screams of terror within ear shot. The only time Rudolph directly comments on the massacre happening under his watch is when some bones float into the river and interrupt a pleasant family outing. Suffering and death on a massive scale is only a minor inconvenience for him.

A common reaction to “The Zone of Interest” has been to say it's about the “banality of evil.” Even Steven Spielberg has used this line. And, yes, the film is about that. Near the end, while bored at a party, Rudolf absent-mindedly wonders how much effort it would take to gas everyone in the room. Nazi officials did absolutely dreadful things without thinking about their moral consequences. It was a job for them, the extinction of millions being a nine-to-five gig. Yet simply reducing “The Zone of Interest” to the “banality of evil” doesn't even begin to cover everything the film is doing. Using a similar technique to what he did in “Under the Skin,” Glazer's team rigged up the house and its surrounding areas with cameras. This allowed the team to watch the actors play out a daily routine. The events are often watched from afar, observing Höss and his family like a cold and inattentive god. 

This means the audience is watching what is happening with the same dispassionate gaze as the Nazis themselves. We are being made complacent in these horrors too. This makes “The Zone of Interest” a profound statement not just about the Holocaust but about any genocide. All of us are living our day-to-day lives, going to work, eating meals, hanging out with friends and family, while others are dying and suffering somewhere in the world. To participate in Western society is to take part in a massive machine that only operates at the cost of countless lives. Right now, the U.S. government is funding a genocide in Gaza by Israel. How many other pitiless atrocities have the average American contributed to with their tax dollars totally unawares? Glazer's film uncomfortably asks us to consider that turning a blind eye on ceaseless human suffering unimaginable is not especially difficult or unique. It may, in fact, be an unavoidable component of the American condition. 

That Spielberg would comment on “The Zone of Interest” is intriguing. Spielberg's own “Schindler's List” generated debate, if it was even morally responsible to make a movie about the Holocaust. Film, even the greatest and best intentioned films, are spectacles. Somebody, somewhere, is going to be munching on popcorn and Jujubes while watching a reenactment of the systematic slaughter of six million Jews, five hundred thousand Romani, a hundred thousand homosexuals, and countless others. Some studio lackey will be checking the box office returns on how many people bought tickets to such a show. Is cinema, as a medium, uniquely incapable of capturing the horrors of such an event? Glazer's film circumnavigates this dilemma as much as it can by simply never depicting all the visuals clichés we associate with Holocaust movies. We see the garden fertilized with ashes. Gun shots and wails of agony break up the unending churning of the furnaces. Yet the audience is forced to imagine everything else. The movie glues us to our seats and has the terrors of these events germinate in our minds for 105 minutes. 

This is not the only way that Glazer and his team take the spectacle out of the idea of filmmaking. The far-off cinematography is often paired with utterly mundane activities. We watch these little figures do totally mundane, every day tasks. Rudolf talks on the phone with his officials, who coldly commend him on his horrible work. We see a whole room full of high-ranking Nazis go through the steps of bureaucracy. When combined with the daily chores, it is monotonous. When combined with the unending sounds of torment, “The Zone of Interest” gives the impression of being in Hell itself. The only time Glazer breaks form is when showing a Polish girl sneaking into the camp and leaving food for workers. These scenes are shot in inverted monochrome and accompanied by Mica Levi's bellowing, groaning, ogre-like soundtrack. (Which is otherwise not present in most of the film.) In its final moments, as Rudolf Höss descends the interior staircases of the camp, as the film becomes unmoored in time and flashes forward to the Auschwitz Museum in the modern day, it's made clear. These events will exist forever, the acts of these men will reverberate through history eternally. Yes, if eternal damnation exists, it is surely very much like this. 

In other words: “The Zone of Interest” is a staggering masterpiece, a uniquely powerful achievement that seeks to not just have the audience understand the horrors of the Holocaust but forces us to grapple with their implications like few films have before. It's a great movie. It's also a movie I never want to see again. The film summons a foreboding atmosphere more nightmarish than any horror film I've ever seen. Movies about the Holocaust will continue to be made, as long as films continue to be made. I don't think there will ever be another film on the topic like this one. Part of me hopes there never will be. “The Zone of Interest” is an astute, haunting exorcism of true evil. [9/10]