Will Sorg-

It is Jan. 30th, 2024, as I am writing this. About 4 hours ago, I left the movie theater. I realized while I was sitting in my car, shaking, that I had to write a review on The Zone of Interest. I was not planning on writing something until school started up properly again, but this movie demanded that I get something out onto the page. I don’t know if a movie has made me feel this way before. I have not just a desire to write, but a need.

The Zone of Interest is a 2023 film by director Jonathan Glazer. The film follows the day-to-day lives of the family of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. The film is only an hour and forty minutes and every second is a nightmare. When I say that the film follows the Höss family, I mean that this is all it follows. Visually we are given only glimpses of the horrors of Auschwitz. A majority of the film takes place in the Höss family’s home. A multi-bedroom, two-floor house with a garden and a pool connected out back. It looks like a moderately sized 1940s house and much of the film is spent watching moments of domesticity between the family.

We follow Höss and his wife, Hedwig, as they parent their four children, entertain in-laws, and celebrate birthdays. The filmmakers used a multi-cam setup that allowed for zero crew to be on set during shooting and it gave the actors remarkable opportunities to truly sell that they are actually living and interacting in the house as a family. As a result, I found myself being forced into immersion. I did not want to feel so engrossed in the film that it felt real, but the filmmakers fully pull you into that feeling. There wasn’t a minute after the first scene where I wasn’t locked into this movie and I was constantly hoping for a reprieve, some chance at a bright spot, or maybe even just a break. This film offers none of that.

The sound is especially oppressive. My words cannot do the horrors of this film’s sound design justice. Every time a scene feels almost normal, a sound coming from over the camp walls is heard. A gunshot, a baby crying, shouting, a dog growling, a furnace roaring to life. The whole weight of the Holocaust is brought out from movie theater speakers and poured into your ears and every single time, you tense up a little bit more. The sound is unforgiving in all aspects. Mica Levi’s masterful musical score drones and hisses and makes it so that in the few scenes where there is no horrid noise from the in-world soundscape you are crushed by an auditory sensation that feels like the heralding of the apocalypse. And when you get used to that music, the screaming and crying and the gunshots and the shouting all come back.

Why? Why focus on the Höss family? Why make a film about the Holocaust in which (in simple terms) the conflict is painfully mundane? After watching, I realized that there might not be any other better way to make art about an atrocity like this. The Zone of Interest is about that mundanity. It is interrogating how a family, including young children, are possibly able to compartmentalize their involvement in one of the worst atrocities in human history. There is such a deep-rooted dissonance in every scene of the film. Hedwig Höss grows vines to try and cover up the prison walls in an attempt to distance herself from what she is allowing. Rudolf Höss is a terrifying, unnerving, beast-like character, yet he is so unremarkable. He reads bedtime stories to his kids, sits through boring bureaucratic meetings, and has marital troubles. That’s the real horror of this film. If you re-edited it to remove the sound design, cut around the prison camp, and showed this to someone who had never heard of The Holocaust, they would not really be able to piece together what was happening in the background for a very long time.

So what does the film decide to reveal about the act of doing nothing in the face of abject evil? It reveals that doing nothing is easy. In fact participating in atrocities is easy, especially when it is tied to bureaucracy and nationalism. One of the biggest myths about the Holocaust is that it is an unimaginable horror that could never happen again. It’s not. The Nazis were not the first genocidal government; they are not the last. This kind of accepted evil is happening in the world right now. It’s happening because for many people, their first and only response in the face of evil is to compartmentalize and allow it to happen so long as it never directly hurts themselves. The Höss family is not an abnormality, they are a typical response to evil. That fact keeps me up at night.