A chief characteristic of non-documentary cinema is the way the director’s unique vision not only shapes but also stylistically characterizes the narrative. Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest (2024), adapted from Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, has a taste for darkness that transforms otherwise naturalistic settings into enchanted spaces. Glazer’s film Birth (2004), for example, begins with a long “god’s eye” (overhead) sequence of a man jogging in Central Park. The man enters a tunnel and is never seen again, and the narrative proper commences as a fantastic tale of a woman living in a posh upper East Side apartment who must deal with the tension generated by a pre-adolescent boy presenting himself as the incarnation of her dead husband. In Under the Skin (2013), set in Glasgow, an alien femme fatale (in human skin) inhabits a nondescript apartment. When her prey approach, attracted by the sight of her standing semi-naked at the end of a long corridor, they appear slowly to sink into an inky blackness. A similar uncanniness haunts The Zone of Interest, despite the bureaucratic opacity of its title.
Zone, which could be subtitled “The Sociopathology of Everyday Life (at Auschwitz),” is the ironic account of a climactic summer-to-winter period in the life of Rudolph Höss (played by Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their four children. Höss is the notorious commandant of the camp. Glazer begins the film with an overture of several minutes of blackness following the title, accompanied by a miasmic, droning and cacophonous score – thoroughly unnatural – that begins to be threaded with birdsong. The song is an audible cue that carries over to the first visual image; a high-angle longshot tableau of the Höss family picnicking by a tree-lined river. The scene stands apart like a vivid screen memory, as we see papa Höss and the two boys bathing, then Frau Höss packing up her two daughters, one an infant, and traipsing home through an overgrown trail of shrubbery. Next is a classic establishing shot of their house at night, viewed from outside with the interior lights shutting down one at a time, as if by magic. (The next evening we follow Höss from room to room throughout the house, as he turns off the lights and locks the doors — as if against threats from the exterior darkness.)
A seemingly ordinary day follows, with a morning routine of kids dressing for school, maids clearing the breakfast table, a klatsch of woman friends gossiping with Hedwig about some second-hand garments; and the first apparent incongruity, Höss riding a horse to work at the walled camp directly adjacent to the house. Further disquiet is induced by an inordinately extended tracking shot of a workman with a wheelbarrow walking parallel to the thick gray wall of Frau Höss’s garden. A chilly reminder of the activity on the other side of the wall, the contents of the wheelbarrow is a large bag containing used clothing. In a subsequent scene, Hedwig tries on a mink coat in front of a full-length mirror and notes a rip in the lining. She orders one of the maids to repair the rip and clean the coat. Everything must of course be cleaned.
In this film, less plotted than precisely dreamt, Glazer illustrates the splitting, dissociation, and dehumanization that permitted the conception, construction, and sadistic operation of the death camps. The hateful and perverse ideology underlying the placid life of the Höss family isn’t explicit but is revealed in casual but surprising references to Jews – how clever they are to hide gemstones in toothpaste tubes, for example, and an utterance from Hedwig’s mother, recalling her former work as a housekeeper in a Jewish household. This reference also helps to account for the fierceness of Hedwig’s personal desire, a class aspiration, to maintain their life in this eastern “paradise”; this aspiration, even in immediate proximity to the camp, implies her subjection to Hitler’s Lebensraum propaganda justifying the occupation of Poland. As for the camp’s functioning, Glazer alludes to it with glimpses of flame from massive towers visible through the windows of the house, and occasional sounds of gunfire and shouting. Arendt’s oft-cited banality or malignant thoughtlessness of evil is enacted when Höss commends the ingenuity of a couple of civilian architects, who meet with him at the house to discuss engineering blueprints for more efficient sequencing of incinerators that allow ashes to cool faster.
Glazer’s attention to routine, undramatic movements through interior spaces is complemented with ominous imagery of hallways, staircases, and tunnels – in particular, a barren tunnel from under the house that connects a space occupied by Höss alone to the camp. Above ground, Hedwig’s pride is the double garden that includes a variety of flowers, vegetables, a green house, and even a small swimming pool for the children. Imagine the profound distress she experiences on the very day the family is hosting a pool party, when her husband informs her that he’s been promoted to overseer of all the camps! The threat of having to leave this Eden is too much for her to bear. In an almost poignant scene on a narrow pier on the flowing river, Hedwig beseeches her husband to allow her and the family to stay, even if his duty to the Reich necessitates a transfer.
Among various disruptions of realism (itself an artifice of film technique), Zone is punctuated by two quasi-oneiric interludes shot in a negative (light becomes dark) style, episodes which psychoanalyst Julie Gerhardt likens to unrepresented or split off states. (Gerhardt 2024, personal communication.) These interludes, which add to the mystique or spellbound quality of the narrative, follow scenes in which Höss reads violent fairy tales to his elder daughter – Hans Christian Andersen’s the “Wild Swans” and the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel”. These are both stories in which children escape death at the hands of witches. (In the latter, of course, the wicked witch is thrown into an oven.) While the interludes are obscure, one seems to depict a young girl gathering apples for some mysterious purpose and the other perhaps refers to music from the camps. Along with these episodes, Glazer includes color-matching edit from an extreme closeup of a rapturously red flower in Hedwig’s garden to the screen lit red (a “red out”), instead of the usual fade to black between sequences. One imagines a battered eye beclouded with blood. Later, ordinary dialogue on the soundtrack is disrupted by a great, hollow, boom — as if a mechanical belch of revulsion.
Any sense that Zone overly aestheticizes the subject matter, or effectively mitigates our feeling for the horror of the death camps by generating sympathy for the family, is qualified by the concluding sequences. In the first, the camera follows Höss in his new position away from Auschwitz. He wanders desultory among officers in dress uniforms and formally dressed civilians at a large party in a gilded rococo setting. He climbs the stairs to look down at the dancers from the mezzanine of the grand ballroom, then calls Hedwig on the telephone and reports, off-handedly, that he thought it would be very difficult to gas everybody in the ballroom because of the height of the building. Afterwards, we see him descend a stairway into darkness. In the final sequence, displacing us to the present, the camera cuts from a black screen to the shadowy halls of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, where we see a team of maids sweeping the floors, indifferent to the wide glass windows displaying piles of shoes and the striped garments of the murdered inhabitants.
1 According to “The Real Hero of The Zone of Interest” (The Hollywood Reporter, March 15, 2024), Glazer intended these episodes as a tribute to a little-known Polish resistance fighter, Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk. She inspired the night-vision scenes, which show the young girl gathering apples as food for prisoners of Auschwitz.
