Can a movie you’ll never want to watch again be considered one of the best films of the year? 5 stars for something that challenges, disturbs, bores and disgusts you? The Zone of Interest could well be exactly this. Director Jonathan Glazer has helmed a singular piece of work that surely will be in the running for Academy Awards.

 

The Zone of Interest explores the lives of the family of German Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz in World War 2, who live on the outside of the camp in the idyllic luxury of a countryside manor. The freedom, wealth and privilege they enjoy is all in the shadow of the concentration camp. The sounds of despair emanate constantly from behind the wall that separates the family from horror. 

 

The Zone of Interest examines this dynamic in a novel but peculiar way. The film’s sound design is central in how it presents the horror of the camp to the audience, but the camera doesn’t investigate this. We see the family of the commandant in their well tended garden, the kids swimming in their pool on a hot day. The mother of the commander’s wife Hedwig comes to visit and admires the choice of flowers her daughter has made for the garden. We see this, but in the background the constant thrum of the camp: unnatural tones from human voices, mechanical grinding and creaking, and the sound of the chimneys in operation.

 

It is striking how effective this approach is in illustrating the inhumanity of this point in time of human history. Almost by default, it is an effective presentation of the concept of the banality of evil through the character arcs of the central couple of the film, the camp commandant and his wife. Their motivations and choices they make seem to embody this notion entirely, and are ultimately quite disturbing. 

 

The film is unsurprisingly quite cold as a result. The subject matter, in combination with the film’s novel approach to it, doesn’t allow for much in the way of heart to exist. The only thing in the film that is close to a reprieve are the black and white sequences of a young girl outside on her own, placing apples in trenches, gulleys and the banks of walkways for the prisoners of Auschwitz to find.

 

These sequences were shot with thermal cameras, and are an expression of the acts of a real little girl named Alexandria during the war. Director Jonathan Glazer met with and heard the story of the woman just weeks before she died at the age of 90, and her actions presented here give the film its only source of hope.

 

The Zone of Interest is a challenging film, but one that manages to provide a novel interpretation and presentation of the Holocaust despite following in the footsteps of many historic films before it.