Reviews: The Zone of Interest from New York Film Festival 2023

Final Rating 4/5

In the most recent episode of the recently back on-air Last Week Tonight, in a segment about homeschooling, John Oliver brings up Dissident Homeschool, an online community whose aim is to find “Nazi-approved homeschool material.” While it’s somewhat played for laughs and used as a segue to point out how unregulated homeschooling is in America, it kind of strikes at the terror of the modern Neo Nazi movement. Sure you see images of white supremacists marching with tiki torches or hanging swastikas over highways, but the real insidiousness is that behind closed doors, John and Jane next door who always pitch in during community clean up days may be behind closed doors reading Mein Kampf to their children. 

The chilling juxtaposition of the evils of Nazism against the humdrum of household life is at the core of Johathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Based on a novel by the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer portrays the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig (played by Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller respectively) in an almost boring manner. They seem like a model family raising their children; reading to them at night and taking them to the river to go swimming. They’ve built an idyllic life – they host picnics in their garden next to the greenhouse with a dog who tries to sneak off with some snacks. 

But if you look just over the garden wall, you can see smokestacks and barracks of the concentration camp. You can see the orange glow of fire at night. Herr Höss has a daily commute of literally walking out his front door and around the corner into the camp. He even makes an announcement at one point to ask his soldiers to not pick flowers from lilac bushes haphazardly, and that he hopes they’ll continue to decorate the camp for years to come. It’s almost unnerving how the entire family, from the parents to the children to even the help around them, seem to not react to the sounds you hear – of yelling officers, crying prisoners, or the dull roar of furnaces overnight – as they go about their daily chores.

I want to call out the sound design of Johnnie Burn (who also worked on this year’s Poor Things, as well as last year’s Nope by Jordan Peele). At the Q&A at NYFF with Glazer, Huller, Friedel, a producer and Burn, they talked about how there are two films layered here – the film you see with your eyes, and the film hear with your ears. On their own they are films we’ve seen before. A family going about their life, and the horrors of the Holocaust. But together, they are greater than the sum of their parts, showing how much evil can look like what we think of as good upstanding citizens. Glazer intentionally doesn’t show the actual horrors of the camps to us. We’ve all seen it before and he didn’t feel it’s his place, but the fact that we know it’s there is enough.

I also want to praise the production design, led by Chris Oddy. Not only did they recreate the Höss house basically on site right next to Auschwitz, not only did he grow the garden from scratch in about four months, but the way the house was designed itself enabled the film to be shot the way it was. The cinematography of the film is almost documentary-esque. Fixed cameras placed throughout the house almost as if they are trail cameras for late night safari’s hoping to catch a glimpse of wild animals in their natural habitat. We see one servant girl walk from outside down the hallway through the kitchen into the dining room doing chores, cutting from room to room, before cutting to the study behind closed doors next door where Höss and some engineers discuss plans for a more efficient furnace. These takes were ten minutes long, with multiple scenes being acted at once for a more lived in experience, that really sell the point of the film. 

If there were some quibbles I had with the film, perhaps they would be that there are occasional “experimental” sequences shot in almost night vision quality that were hard to decipher what they contributed overall. Likewise, while Mica Levi’s score works at parts, at others the dissonant deep tones are more distracting than additive. In addition, the ending, while perhaps poignant in one interpretation, also doesn’t really provide a catharsis or release of this unease and tension built up throughout the film. Perhaps though that’s the point, that we shouldn’t be at ease after seeing this. 

The Zone of Interest presents a new portrayal of Nazis and the Holocaust in media different than any I’ve seen before. You have the almost comical mustache twirling villain Nazi’s who telegraph their evil intent. The stock villains for any action story set in that decade, from Indiana Jones to Hellboy. You have stories of German youth who were led astray into the war movement through patriotic zeal, such as in both iterations of All Quiet on the Western Front. You have the perspective of the Jewish victims and those who tried to help them, such as in Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List or The Diary of Anne Frank. 

But here you have one that, as Glazer said, eschews the trappings of cinema to show how very much like us the perpetrators of this unspeakable horror can appear to be. They may be the subjects of the film, but they are by no means glorified or flattered, but also not at the same time overtly villainized – a fine balance to strike that Glazer and his cast and crew pull off masterfully.

The Zone of Interest was seen during the New York Film Festival.