“The Zone Of Interest” Sticks With You Long After Watching It

“Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.”

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writer: Jonathan Glazer, Martin Amis
Starring: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller
Release Date: September 1, 2023
IMDB

It’s a bold choice to try and tell a human story that revolves around feeling empathy toward Nazis. Jonathan Glazer takes on this burden and miraculously tells a story that is equally beautiful and terrifying. The Zone Of Interest, which is adapted from a Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, is a family drama that makes sure to home in on the quietest moments and show the strange state of bliss that Höss’ family firmly thought they were living in.

Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is a commander in the German army working at Auschwitz. He and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) raise their family literally footsteps from an entrance to the camp. Their backyard is fenced in by the gray concrete wall that keeps the prisoners of Auschwitz from escaping. Everyday life for the Hoss family involves overhearing gunshots, screams and pleas.

The Höss family is living a good life, but the balance of life is thrown off when Rudolf is told that he has been promoted, and reassigned. Hedwig does not want to leave the idyllic home they have built, next to Auschwitz, and so begins the family dispute that everyone could have predicted. Rudolf and Hedwig must hash out family matters and try to find a compromise that will keep their family dynamic acceptable. It’s a classic real-life, relatable drama, with the backdrop of Auschwitz.

For The Zone Of Interest to work, Jonathan Glazer had to make so many correct choices. One wrong misstep with a premise like this can derail the entire project. Glazer stares that possibility down and respectfully tells it to step aside. The Zone Of Interest stands tall on outstanding merits.

It is impossible to talk about The Zone Of Interest and not talk about the sound. THE SOUND. Tarn WIllers and Johnnie Burn earned the Oscar for Best Sound with this movie, and what an outstanding surprise that was on awards night. It is not often that a movie steeped in silence and subtlety beat out action juggernauts or musical biopics. The Zone Of Interest tears down that expectation by making gunshots an auditory tick similar to bird coos.

The sound is crucial to The Zone Of Interest because Jonathan Glazer made the choice not to show any of the holocaust atrocities on screen. We never see what happens inside the walls of Auschwitz. The closest that we get is a worm shot of Rudolf waiting outside as a train of captives funnel out into the camp. All the audience sees is Rudolf overseeing the terror, but the audience can hear the horror. Gunshots, screaming, pleading and crying echo in the stillness of the shot.

The sound that constantly pesters the audience acts as a giant crescendo to the ending of the film. The Zone Of Interest ends in the present day, inside the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. It’s jarring, beautiful, and silent. Willers and Burns subconsciously made us pay attention to the background noise throughout the movie. Then when we cut to the hushed shrine to those who suffered. It’s gobsmacking.

In various interviews, Glazer stated that he wanted to make The Zone Of Interest in a very interesting way. The way the cameras were staged in the Höss house and the surrounding environments was very documentary-like. There are very few shots that have any motion to them. The stillness of the viewing experience combined with the fictional story adds to the unique story that Glazer is telling. These characters are fake, but where the story is based is 100% true. The choice to keep the camera still forces that audience to sit still and take in what’s unfolding in front of them.

Strangely enough, The Zone Of Interest is a weird version of a Wes Anderson horror film. The director most known for his unique staging of the camera could watch this movie and see some inspiration from his own work.

There are many snippets from The Zone Of Interest that act as visual gut punches towards the audience. The innate cuteness of the Höss children playing in the backyard is shattered when the older brother locks a younger brother in the garden house and imitates as if deadly gas is being let in. The character trait of Rudolf to not bring his work home is shone in a scarring way with an over-the-top shot of a jewish prisoner washing the blood off Rudolf’s boots outside with a faucet. Then there is a sales pitch by some furnace designers where they are describing how their new engineering plan would increase production and efficiency. Four men just talk shop as if they are in an all-glass meeting room in a modern office, only its Nazis in a living room. Horrifyingly grounded stuff.

The Zone Of Interest is an outstanding movie not just while you’re watching it, but also after the fact. It’s a movie that’s wholly unique in its style and story. It also brought about a big question that I have had fun asking random people:

What’s worse?

Being part of a society or culture that is knowingly doing something horrific and choosing not to stop, or living amongst tragedy and terror but thinking it’s totally normal and acceptable?

There may not be a right answer, but it’s something fun to debate and see.

Before wrapping up, we just have to praise Sandra Hüller for the year she had. Those within the industry knew who she was before the year 2023, but for many including myself, Hüller emerged from nowhere to appear in two Best Picture nominees. Hüller earned her first Oscar nomination for Anatomy Of A Fall (2023) and has set herself up for the next part of her career.

Eventually I am going to rank the ten Best Picture nominees, and The Zone Of Interest is guaranteed a top three spot. Oppenheimer (2023) has the top spot, but after that, it’s fair game.

You look at the two films and they are two remarkably different stories: one is about a man working through the guilt about becoming death and the destroyer of worlds while another literally is committing genocide, yet his guilt resides in not being able to bring happiness to his family.

Two different stories revolving around cataclysmic events orbiting the same war. Awesome stuff.

Zone Of Interest won two Academy Awards at the 2024 Oscars: Best International Feature and Best Sound. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Directing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was one of just three movies to win multiple Academy Awards, joining Oppenheimer and Poor Things (2023).

STANKO RATING: A

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