From Jonathan Glazer and Ewa Puszczyńska comes a film that caught my attention with its striking cinematography and deceptively low-key visuals—something that may be one of the unsettling depictions of a great low point in human history since Schindler’s List. Produced between the UK and Poland, here’s my take on The Zone of Interest.
Our focus is commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family, living by the former’s workplace in a little place near Oświęcim, or as it is better known, Auschwitz. Rudolf and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) seem to have all the oh so typical domestic concerns—work promotion, splitting up the family, an environment for the kids, and so on. In fact, for Rudolf, the whole thing seems to be pinned on his own career standing within the greater apparatus of National Socialism. All of this is happening to a background ambience of industrial machinery running day and night, pained noises, and smoke belching.
Very little is actually shown of what’s happening over their fence, but it doesn’t have to be. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal is one I really liked—there’s lots of long running shots where the conversation we’re having is only a single facet, and your eye can’t help but be drawn to the buildings hanging back. You could ignore it and focus on just the figures talking…but then that starts to get into the main thrust of the film.
With everything framed in oh so relatable everyday terms, the sheer banality of evil creeps up on you—you get tastes here and there as Hedwig for instance lords herself over the Polish domestic servants indentured to the household, and how Rudolf only really shows concern for the consequences of what he’s doing when runoff from the camp starts affecting his kids in a river. Out of sight and out of mind—apathy, much more so than cackling malice, is often the greatest evil of all, and it’s one perfectly illustrated here.
There’s all sorts of little touches that reward a close eye—like for instance one of the Höss sons making out with a Polish servant girl behind a wall, even as other Nazi officers visit his father behind them. To their ideology, this is an unforgivable ‘race mixing’—and to anyone with such knowledge, it raises the unease permeating everything just a few more chilling notches. There’s also another moment where Rudolf talks about flowers, which seems out of place at first—before you realize what’s really going on.
And as we move things on to the next act, we once again get something all too coldly relatable to frame things—with Nazi chiefs treating the whole operation essentially akin to a business venture. There’s a stark reminder of how they collaborated with German companies, with Rudolf all too happy to skim off the side too while he’s at it. And, while the film is all too happy to impress its atmosphere of low-key oppression, there is one little ray of hope at the end done in a way I wasn’t quite expecting.
With the way Nazism and fascism and all kinds of terms can be misused and generalized across the board, this is a good a way as any to show just how insidious such things really are, and how one easy things can be for some when they can just look away. The film is also at just the right kind of length to illustrate this point—no need to linger, just let the visuals tell their story. The little things that add up, the peons jostling to make their place in service of state—in many a bloody state, these were the blinkered officials that kept the machinery of madness moving.
And as someone who’s known people and family who had all too close contact with such madness, it does hit with the cold precision it has to.
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