Review: The Zone Of Interest

Image courtesy of A24.

There's a jolting moment late in Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest," which is likely the most horrifying PG-13 movie you'll ever see, when a vision from the future briefly infiltrates the past. It's near the film's end as Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is walking down a dark hallway. 

Rudolf briefly appears as if he's going to vomit but then pauses and the camera takes us through a peephole. Behind the door we see women in the present cleaning up what appears to be the Auschwitz camp in the modern day and age and it is now, of course, an historic site. Behind glass enclosures, we see stacks of shoes or clothing that were taken off the Jews who were murdered at the camp. The women clean the place with vacuums. Then, we cut back to the past as Rudolf makes his way down a dark staircase.

There will be different interpretations as to what Glazer was reaching for here, but it appeared to me to signify the preservation of the truth and the historical record after having spent nearly two hours in the company of characters who not only took part in mass murder, all the while speaking about it as any person would discuss their day-to-day job, but also spend much of the film obfuscating in one way or other.

The film opens with Rudolf and his wife, Hedwig (a ferocious Sandra Huller), and children bathing in a lake not too far from where they live. Their house is on the other side of the wall from Auschwitz, so there are numerous scenes of children playing in a makeshift lawn pool or taking part in games while just feet away we see smoke rising from the camp's gas chambers and hear the sounds of barking dogs, human screams, and occasional gunshots.

Adding to the horror of the normalcy during these proceedings are the dinner table conversations during which Hedwig and her visitors discuss stealing items of clothing - at one point, she tries on a Jewish woman's stolen coat and fishes a lipstick out of its pocket - from people who were likely killed just hundreds of feet from her home. Also jarring are meetings in which Rudolf takes part where he and fellow Nazi leaders discuss the extermination of thousands of people as if they were discussing the restocking of an item at a store or some other mundane thing that office workers might talk about.

The film is a study in what Hannah Arendt once called the banality of evil. Yes, Hitler's name is invoked here several times and Rudolf and his family occasionally make a passing remark that displays their disdain for Jews - but not enough to prevent them from keeping them as help around their house or, in Rudolf's case, having sex with one of them, an act that he follows by cleaning himself off in the sink quietly in the late night hours - but "The Zone of Interest" otherwise shows a group of people going about their daily lives, which include discussing work-related minutiae or concern about the well-being of their children.

And this is what makes it so disturbing and effective. On the one hand, the film doesn't necessarily humanize these people - Glazer's approach, as was the case in his 2013 masterwork "Under the Skin," is chilly and Kubrickian - but it certainly shows them as human. And, of course, it was humans - and not literal monsters - who carried out these atrocities.

To make matters even more unsettling, Glazer includes some experimental elements in the picture, including a sequence that looks as if it were shot with night-vision goggles during which a young girl collects fruit near the camp. The film opens with a completely black screen and warbling noises that go on seemingly forever - I wanted to point this out for viewers, so they don't think there's something wrong with the screen - and there are occasional long fades to black or, in one case, red.

The Auschwitz camp is never fully seen - in fact, there's only a shot of a blazing incinerator in the background as Rudolf looks up at the night sky in one scene. There's also no violence onscreen, which probably explains the film's rating. But the film is deeply unsettling regardless.

Back to that final scene. As I'd mentioned, my interpretation of it is that it shows Auschwitz in its present day iteration as an historic site where a horrible history is preserved. Throughout the film, Rudolf and his cohorts carry out their crimes in plain sight, but the movie's characters still behave as if they are acting in secret - one of Rudolf's children counts collected gold teeth from dead Jews with a flashlight under the covers at night, Rudolf hurries his children out of a popular swimming spot after he steps on a human bone, and Hedwig's mother first appears to be impressed with the home that her daughter and husband have built for themselves but after listening at night to the horrors taking place nearby, she leaves without so much as as goodbye. 

There are discussions throughout the film by Nazi officials in which they discuss the deportation and murder of thousands of Jews in an offhand manner, and while at the time they may have believed that their backroom scheming might have been kept under wraps, that shot of the women cleaning Auschwitz in the present day shows how these crimes have been preserved for all to witness some 80 years later. "The Zone of Interest" is, perhaps, the year's most unsettling film - and one of its best.