Reaction to The Zone of Interest has been polarised. On one side there are the Igeddits: "They live next to Auschwitz and they’ve become desensitised to the violence – I geddit!" For them, the film is repetitive and, once the scenario is clear, boring. On the other side are the Masterpiecers: "Never has the banality of evil been so truthfully and disturbingly portrayed – it’s a masterpiece!"
The truth is: both are right. The Zone of Interest sets its stall out in the first few minutes, and it proceeds to repeat its message through different scenarios until the end. The narrative progression is more vertical than lateral: it gradually takes us deeper into the lives and mindsets of its characters, while their story shifts only slightly from beginning to end. It finds different ways to depict the same horror, just as the Nazis found different ways to enact it. The experience is more like visiting an art exhibition than having a story unfold before your eyes. By the end of the Royal Academy’s latest Monet retrospective you might feel that you’d seen similar paintings over and over again, but you also may emerge with a deeper understanding of the subject.
In one sense The Zone Of Interest is very timely. It reminds us, at a moment when the word is being debated, what a ‘genocide’ is. Even in its comparative downtime of 1943, when the film is set, and when there simply weren’t that many Jews left in German territory to kill, Auschwitz was a place of ritualised, planned and mechanised slaughter on a scale never witnessed before or since. As The Zone Of Interest finishes, the Nazis are just gearing up for the destruction of the Hungarian Jewish population: 700,000 lives taken in eight weeks, over half of them in this little scrap of Poland. If they had been a tiny bit more successful, then the Jews would be nothing but a memory by now. If you drive around Poland today you can get an idea of what the world might so nearly have been: synagogues repurposed as cafés and cinemas, cemeteries tended by nobody, fast disappearing back into the earth.
The focus of Jonathan Glazer’s film is on the daily life of Auschwitz Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss and his family. They live in comparative luxury in a family home, with central heating, servants, vegetable patches and a swimming pool, tucked right up against the wall of Auschwitz I. In reality, Höss ensured that the crematorium chimney was shielded from view (and in any case, by 1943 it had been closed down due to the main killing operation being moved to Birkenau, a few miles away). But in the film it burns bright in the night sky, illuminating the bedrooms in lurid red.
The main achievement of the film lies in simultaneously backgrounding and foregrounding the horrors of the death camp. For the Höss family, almost von-Trapp-like with their multiple children and infant Lederhosen, the constant screams, gunshots and orchestras are so commonplace that they have become inaudible (I lived next to a railway line when I was growing up, and there is no doubt that constant exposure to a particular noise makes you impervious to it.). For the audience, it’s the very near-inaudibility of the sounds that makes them so noticeable. For the duration of the film, we hear what the characters have trained themselves to ignore, and it’s their apparent indifference to the obvious suffering next door that hits home.
When Hannah Arendt, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, she did not mean that evil itself is humdrum and tedious. She meant that the figures behind the genocide were able, by cutting themselves off from the consequences of their pen-pushing, to turn it into an exercise in emotionless accounting. They spoke of ‘cargo’ and ‘units’ instead of people. The lives of the Höss family, as depicted here, are the ultimate banality of evil. They participate in the brutality going on next door, while simultaneously ignoring – but not being ignorant of – its reality. There are many disturbing scenes illustrating this, but the one that most perfectly sums up the life of the Hösses, is that in which Rudolf’s wife Hedwig (who died in 1989 in America) takes a regular delivery of underclothes and fur coats from the camp, happy to revel in the freebies that come her way from the murdered victims over the garden wall. She finds a gold lipstick compact in the fur coat pocket, and treats it as a welcome added extra, while the audience can only think about the woman who until a few hours ago owned these trinkets.
Glazer finds different ways to twist this ironic knife of complicity throughout the film, always counterbalancing the suffering of the invisible victims with the privilege of their abusers. A leisurely family swim in the river has to be abandoned when a vast cloud of ashes gets carried through by the current, a human jawbone snagging on Rudolf’s black swimming trunks. The family pup gets over-excited by the sound of attack dogs barking and savaging Jews, and has to be gently shushed. Hedwig’s mother comes to visit, and remarks with conversational interest that a Jewish woman she used to know (and didn’t like) is probably next door right now.
To quote Holocaust survivor Larry Orbach, who was at Auschwitz: "They knew what they did. And they did it with pleasure. They did it with profit. And they did it with pride."
All of this is shot with a dispassionately distanced lens. Glazer’s compositions are deliberately formal, almost geometric, as dehumanised as his subjects. He forces us to bear witness, not to involve ourselves emotionally. And Paul Watts’ editing matches this style (as it did in their previous collaboration, the equally challenging Under the Skin from 2013), with cuts that throw us into scenes already in action, like moments caught from a film archive, rather than dramatic set-pieces.
There is a scene when Glazer consciously pays homage to Joshua Oppenheimer’s devastating 2012 documentary The Act of Killing (in which former death squad leaders from Indonesia’s corrupt administration in the 1960s and 70s openly recount their crimes, and discuss in matter-of-fact detail their favourite torture and execution techniques). The thematic link with Zone of Interest is obvious. At the end of Oppenheimer’s film, the central figure, a cheerful mass murderer called Anwar Congo, suddenly realises that he is evil, having never considered it before. The impact of this self-knowledge causes him to retch uncontrollably. Höss does the same thing in Zone of Interest, before experiencing a vision of the future, in which cleaning staff prepare the Auschwitz Museum of today for its daily influx of tourists.
Likewise there are hints that, despite their luxurious lifestyle, Höss’s children are being dehumanised by their daily exposure to barbarity. Their games include making firing squads out of toy soldiers and locking each other up in the greenhouse. Like a pus-ridden splinter, the corruption will find a way out.
So is it a masterpiece? Is it boring? Is it both? These questions are irrelevant. Masterpieces are in the eyes of the beholder. Boredom depends as much on the viewer’s state of mind as the film’s content. But by focusing exclusively on the Höss family, Jonathan Glazer has opened the possibility for all of us to be complicit in inhumanity. How many ‘horrors next door’ do we choose to ignore on a daily basis, both on street and international level? How much suffering went into the clothes we wear? And how much do we know of that suffering, but choose to disregard?