Sandra Hüller as Hedwig in The Zone of interest (2023)
Like his last film, Under the Skin (2013), Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an adaptation of a novel that, over its years of gestation, has transformed its source material to create an austere experimental film that is at once abstract yet immediately accessible.
The Zone of Interest (2014) was a novel by Martin Amis focused on a mid-ranking SS officer at Auschwitz, lusting after the commandant’s wife with a banal desire that entirely brackets all the horror around him, a mass-murder machine evaded through indifference and linguistic euphemism. Amis’s heavy-handed satire makes the commandant’s own narration that of a deluded monster, dogged at his grim tasks inside the camp. Amis also inserted a counter-voice, one of the Sonderkommando, those few Jewish prisoners who were spared to keep the crematorium working efficiently.
In rigorous contrast, Glazer sticks to one distant and clinical viewpoint, that of the commandant and his family outside the camp, portrayed in a slightly leeched, metallic colour grading. A couple of sequences use thermal cameras at night allowing us to see a young woman feverishly hiding food for the slave labourers who work digging pits, perhaps for the planned factory but more likely for the overflow of bodies.
The camera never goes inside the camp, but the wall is ever present: it makes up one side of the commandant’s garden, which is fussed over by his wife, a place for parties and the children to play. The sound designer, Johnnie Burn, has created a soundtrack of distant gunshots, occasional screams sometimes rising to group crescendos – from the gas chambers, one presumes – and grinding machines starting up as chimneys belch smoke. These noises leak into the garden, and are echoed and extended in Mica Levi’s spare musique concrète score.
Glazer used the actual wall of the Auschwitz camp, reconstructing the house of its creator and main commandant, Rudolf Höss, close to its original position. This gives added weight to the decision to stay outside. The plot sticks very closely to Höss’s career at Auschwitz, including the threat to his Edenic garden when he was temporarily recalled to Berlin. The film conforms to the position of Claude Lanzmann (the director of Shoah, 1985), who held that the ethics of Holocaust representation demanded that there could be no fictional version of the unimaginable zone inside the camps.
So, unlike László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015) or Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), both of which focus on the same period in 1944 when Höss was ordered to execute over 400,000 Hungarian Jews in two months at Auschwitz, Glazer does not choose to represent resistance or struggle within the camp. Instead, The Zone of Interest is pitilessly focused on the Höss family home and their bucolic trips to the river and meadows nearby.
The commandant’s wife Hedwig is played with stringent hauteur by Sandra Hüller (another great performance to add to Toni Erdmann, 2016, and the recent Anatomy of a Fall). She tries on furs taken from those selected for the gas chambers, casually threatens her servants with being sent back over the wall, or hisses about office politics with her husband when his post and her idyll are threatened. Höss, played by Christian Friedel, is more of a cipher, less the ideologue and passionate Nazi of his professional career, more of a dispassionate strategist focused on improving the efficiency of the camp, meeting with engineers from IG Farben (who designed the crematoria and made the Zyklon B pesticide), or back in Berlin, with his bosses demanding more efficiency from the camp system.
There is a risk in choosing to maintain this coldly amoral stance, but the glassy surface of this existence is troubled at the edges by sleepwalking children, a mother-in-law’s distress and sudden departure, bad things floating in the river that we do not see, and the dry heaves that afflict Höss in later moments in the film.
In Berlin, Höss gazes down from a balcony at a lavish party, considering only the amount of gas it would take to kill everyone. On the stairs, alone, he stops at a landing and peers into the dark, an engulfing void. What does he see? He looks directly at us, as if he finally grasps the notion that he can be observed as well as be the imperious observer. Does he hear the wrenching noises around him for the first time, and understand that the judgement of history is coming soon, out of that dark?
► The Zone of Interest is in UK cinemas now.