The Zone of Interest 

 

Since I currently am not watching movies as activally as I listen to music. I did not choose to write about a movie that I discovered just this week: “The Zone of Interest” is my favourite movie to discover last year and a piece of film, that I deem to be so impactful, so unique and so important that I just want to recommend it to as many people as possible.

If you haven't watched it: Be warned, the movie tackles the Holocaust in a very disgusting and devastating way, so if you are the slightest sensitive with movies, maybe watch it with a friend and in the right mindset. 

 

Okay, so as I said, The Zone of Interest tackles the multiple genocides commited by the Nazi-Regime in a very unique way. Instead of actively showing what has happened in the  Nazi Concentration Camps, how the deportations happened, or how jewish people tried to flee, here you exclusively follow the private daily life of  Rudolf Höss (commandant of the German Auschwitz concentration camp) and his family. 

 

This means on paper there is not a lot going on except for those weird slice of life stories. But both the viewer and the main characters are constantly made aware of the fact that Auschwitz is there and that this enorm machinery  is producing nothing but suffering. 

On a technical level the whole crew did a phenomenal job at portraying that. I want to highlight Johnnie Burn's work. The sound designer created a 600 page long document to ensure, what we and the characters hear from Auschwitz is a very authentic representation of what the Höss family must have heard at the time they were living next to Auschwitz. Why is that important? A central question for authenticity in historic media since it is sometimes used to fetishise the setting they take place in without actually having something to say about that. 

For The Zone of Interest this is not the case. While the plot and dialogue appear to be pretty boring and mundane most of the time. There is this constant shock of soundwaves and smoke radiating from the death camp. A shock that the Höss family appears to be immune against. The research going into the project, ensuring its accurate depiction is necessary to ensure that the accusations that this movie indirectly levels against the family are as sound as possible, you are seeing real people as they have perceived the Death Camp as when Holocaust was actually taking place in the 20th century, not only an artistic representation of our idea of Auschwitz. 

This shows the audience an incredibly disgusting, but unignorable side of humankind: The ability to ignore evil in the face of comfort. It’s like Hedwig Höss, Rudolf Höss's wife, is telling us: “Sure there is something upsetting happening in Auschwitz, but do you see this House, do you see my garden, the beautiful nature surrounding us and do you see all the medals on my husband's uniform? This is the life I always wanted. What are some gunshots, screams or clouds of stinky smoke against that.”

 

Knowing what happened there and looking at her from the outside, this is super upsetting and disgusting. But the family does not seem like the evil masterminds, that we often portrait the Nazis as. They are ignorant, entitled, clumsy, sometimes neurotic and sometimes ambitious. Suddenly the people overseeing and organising “the greatest crime of humanity” don't seem so different from us. Different from people wanting strangers out of their country at any price. Different from people eating meat and buying products of slave labour. Different from the people that then don't want to see how the products were made. People that care about the stock market more than climate change and people that think the bare minimum is not a human right, but something you need to deserve. And especially people that think this event happened in a vacuum and will never happen again. 

 

I don't say that to humanise or justify the crimes of the Nazis, The Zone of Interest is a disgusting piece of art that made me feel sick. However, in this sickness there was a greater point. A point that the media about the Shoah often does not make. This point is that there were fundamental psychological traits within Nazi-Germany, that allowed for all of this to happen in the first place. Traits like laziness, selective perception, selective empathy, disconnection of your work and lifestyle from its consequences, acceptance of and comfort in the status quo…

…I think you get the idea, simple mundane traits of the human psyche, necessary for people to function without decision fatigue, traits within all of us. Those traits pushed to the extreme is what allowed for the genocides to happen.

 

I view The Zone of Interest as a warning. If we never allow us to question ourselves, fascism comes quicker and more subtle than we might think

 

So to close this, let me quote from the acceptance speech Jonathan Glazer gave at the oscars, after spending years to understand and portray the Höss family:

 

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present - not to say ‘look what they did then’; rather ‘look what we do now’. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza. All the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”

Short: The Zone of Interest is such a profound comment on the nature of humankind and how its flaws have led to the Holocaust in the past, that I think it should be mandatory in schools.

even though it is not an easy watch