The Höss family pours more coffee for themselves while lives are lost over the garden wall.
Written by Shannon Connellan November 12, 2023
The Zone of Interest purposefully shuts off your hearing for the first few minutes of the movie.
Whispers and the sounds of nature are interwoven with droning notes on a lingering black screen.
You are thrown into a simultaneous amplification and sensory deprivation meditative state, which has the effect of making you pay attention to everything you hear for the next two hours.
In Jonathan Glazer’s stunning, unsettling new film, sound plays a crucial role in revealing what’s going on behind a blissfully protected garden wall.
The idyllic suburban perfection of an upper middle-class family, led by the longest-serving Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss (played chillingly accurately by Christian Friedel), and his family, is what Glazer gradually reveals.
We are listening to the sounds of Auschwitz, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp located on the outskirts of O?wi?cim, Poland, where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered in five years, the majority of them being Jews.
This contrast, which paints a horrifying picture of complicity amid atrocity, is what gives the movie its gloomy dynamic.
In essence, Glazer’s A24 film places you in close proximity to the location that would later come to symbolise the Nazi genocide—at the family dinner table, lounging by the backyard pool, and celebrating birthdays. The Höss family pours more coffee for themselves while lives are lost over the garden wall.
What is the topic of The Zone of Interest?
The entire plot of The Zone of Interest, which is based on Martin Amis’s 2014 book, takes place in the 40 square kilometre area that the Nazi SS referred to The film mostly takes place in the two-story stucco villa and expansive garden that Rudolf and his wife Hedwig (played by Sandra Hu?ller, who also appears in Anatomy of a Fall) occupy within this euphemistically named space.
Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel in “The Zone of Interest.”Reference: A24
Here, in this gloomy home retreat, Rudolf and Hedwig create a utopia for themselves and their kids, even as the horrors of the camp continue outside the property’s barbed-wire-topped wall.
Cinematographer?ukasz?al (Cold War, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Ida) uses panoptic wide-angle lens to capture these surreal, bucolic scenes, giving the whole thing a slightly unsettling vibe.
The movie begins with a riverbank picnic fit for Renoir, complete with blackberry picking. The Höss family feasts on sumptuous meals in their home, just metres from the camp’s edge.
While children are being casualties of war just beyond their backyard, the children play with their Nazi neighbours.
Not far from one of the worst genocides in history, we embark on an ostentatious house tour with Hedwig’s mother, who is making her first visit to the property.
Burn employs sound to deliberately disrupt the viewer’s experience throughout the film, emphasising the sinister nature of complicity and portraying history in all of its horrifying everyday reality in the first five minutes of the movie.
The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” may be the goal, but the events in the movie are not meant to be heard. The Höss family can be seen in the foreground going about their regular activities, such as attending school, taking care of their flower beds, and doing laundry.
A terrible rumbling permeates every scene as smoke billows, fires burn in the background, and watchtowers purvey the horrors below.
We don’t need to be told; we already know what it is. More importantly, Burn and Glazer are aware that you are aware.
Hedwig Höss, played by Sandra Hu?ller, standing in the family garden.Reference: A24
There are other, more graphic sound effects; Hedwig is seen carelessly tending to her massive greenhouse, and her little boy is playing Yahtzee in his bedroom while the sounds of firing squads reverberate throughout the scene.
A terrifying reflection is evoked in the audience by the sounds of barking dogs, military orders, and that constant rumbling; Glazer employs immobile close-ups of every last exquisite flower in the Höss garden; this scene even fades to bright red.
These are the noises that will haunt you long after the movie ends, when the sounds of hoover cleaners and glass cleaners fill the scene, preparing the location for visitors from the present to confront the horrific realities of the past.
The film’s subtlest moments are also its most unsettling ones.
The euphemism used by the Nazi SS to refer to the region surrounding Auschwitz is one of the main themes that unites The Zone of Interest.
The entire movie explores the terrible power of obfuscation, from the directions given in ominous code to the physical separation between the camp and Höss’s house.
A fountain and pool made out of shower heads are among the creepiest set pieces in the movie, and they are proudly displayed in the Höss backyard.
It’s seated in Hedwig’s garden, her pride and joy. Bright and full of springtime euphoria, Glazer’s visuals clash with this eerie moment.
Subsequently, the same shower head is surrounded by vile scenes of summer bliss, with nearby Nazi families bringing their kids to play in the eerie pool and their mothers relaxing in deck chairs while the smoke billows behind them.
By physically placing the audience on the wrong side of history through stunning cinematography, audacious performances, and superb sound design, Glazer ultimately reduces the horrifying nature of complicity to one of heinous self-interest.
The Zone of Interest will make you sick if you’re paying attention because, whether we like to admit it or not, we’re all capable of being complicit.
After an October screening at the BFI London Film Festival, The Zone of Interest opens in theatres on December 15.