What does it take for one to become desensitized to some of the worst horrors mankind can inflict upon others? Can someone become so utterly tuned out of them that the screams of the dying become simple background noise? As we see on our own news every day as a genocide is committed with our support and funding, it is far easier than one would hope.
It's this conflict that drives The Zone of Interest, the Academy Award-winning latest from Jonathan Glazer, director of Under the Skin and Sexy Beast. In classic Glazer fashion, Zone of Interest is another new turn from him, an almost minimalist domestic drama against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The film focuses on Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his family as they go about their lives in apparent domestic bliss in a home that is directly next to the camp itself. Revealed almost immediately with a cut to the smokestacks towering over the walls surrounding the family's home, the camp hangs like a sword over every moment of the film. It's this contrast of idyllic family life against the backdrop of atrocity that serves as the film's driving force. Rather than attempt to moralize or exploit the suffering for visual horror, Glazer repeatedly and actively keeps the Holocaust in the background to an unnerving, spine-chilling effect, a clear effort to show the dehumanization that made it all possible in the first place. The screams and sobs of the prisoners quietly echo through the background, architects explain the operation of gas chambers the way one would explain the operation of a cash register to a new employee, and in one particularly grim moment, Höss fishes a jawbone from the river, his immediate concern becoming the health of his children playing upstream rather than the thought of how many had to perish for the river to become that polluted in the first place.
Zone of Interest's sound design pulled an upset win over Oppenheimer at the Oscars, and it's hard not to see why. Glazer wields sound incredibly carefully, almost entirely doing away with a score while keeping the background noise at just the right level to unnerve but not distract. It sells the idea of a Höss family as people who have attuned themselves to horror, content to profit off it with stolen clothes and pilfered gold teeth while pushing the emotional weight of it to the back of their minds. But, try as they might, their complicity is inescapable, and their attempts to avoid it simply rot their souls. Höss fights to stop himself from vomiting as he prepares to oversee an operation that will kill 700,000 Hungarian Jews, while his wife, Hedwig, fights against any attempt to take away her newfound luxury, from urging Hoss to keep their family at Auschwitz while he leaves for a promotion to angrily burning a letter left by her horrified mother, who left in the dead of night after visiting the family.
This cold detachment is perfectly played by both Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who, respectively, play Rudolf and Hedwig. Friedel plays Hoss with a sense of bueracratic pride and stoicism, his workmanlike management of the camp contrasting against the acts committed within it, from his calm oversight of a line of desperate prisoners being led off a train to his address of violent rapes of prisoners by guards being framed as a warning not to "damage the flowers", while Hüller is monstrous in her portrayal of Hedwig. Hedwig is immensely stubborn and demanding, lashing out at anyone who would attempt to pierce the picture-perfect world she has crafted in an effort to escape from the guilt of her knowledge of what that world is built off of.
But the guilt is inescapable, and the film's final moments, a jarring vision of the future (our present) of Auchwitz, seem to show both Rudolf and us, the audience, that history is the ultimate judge. While Rudolf and Hedwig are both assigned to the dustbin of history, their legacies little more than obscure accomplices to mass murder, that leaves us. As the credits roll, The Zone of Interest sits with you, leaving you to wonder how we will be looked back upon, even as we assure ourselves that we would never act as they did.
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