Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, The Zone of Interest, which deservedly won an Oscar for the Best Inter national Feature (with another for Best Sound), is a truly extraordinary achievement, quietly dazzling in a way diametrically opposed to Nolan’s majestic feat in Oppenheimer – although both are, in their different ways, historical epics. If Oppenheimer is all about the ups and downs of a genius figuring out the huge issues of war and peace attached to his discoveries, The Zone of Interest takes the domestic sphere as its arena and in this mundane setting the viewer is brought right up against how evil operates insidiously in full sunlight and glorious views of rolling countryside.
The film opens with lush shots of an idyllic landscape in which the Höss family, Rudolph (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig, (Sandra Hüller) and their children, are on the edges of a river packing up their swimming picnic. The young girls are in white dresses with matching bows in their damp hair, the father carries the baby, the family call over their shoulders to one another as they make their way through the woods to where their cars await. Where on earth are we, the viewer wonders, and who is this family?
The year is 1943 and the idyllic countryside is Poland, near the camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp; Rudolph Höss was its longest-serving commandant. The river where the family has been bathing is later discovered to be polluted by human body parts washing downstream, and on that occasion the children are taken home and scrubbed clean by a servant.
The home to which this seemingly innocent family return is a spacious villa with a large, newly planted garden. Alongside the garden is a wall – not even particularly high – constructed f rom grey breezeblocks interspersed with concrete posts covered with barbed wire. Abutting this wall, in the huge complex of camp buildings next door, is hell. The constant racket of the soundtrack engraves the picture on our mind: the low roar of the furnaces, the screams of terror, the shouting of the guards, the barking of dogs.
In the villa, however, mundane domestic routine prevails: there is supper followed by bedtime; the baby cries disconsolately, the family dog, some kind of German short-haired pointer, roams restlessly around the house attended to by no one. Night falls: carefully locking up, Höss discovers one of his daughters, who sleepwalks, sitting on a chair in a corridor. All is not so well: hell has somehow seeped through. He takes her back to bed and, being a good father, reads her a fairy tale.
As he does so, the soundtrack changes to a series of ominous grinding blasts and hoots and we see a young girl, almost a fairytale figure herself in her scarf and bare feet, filmed in negative with a thermal camera. The girl is burying apples in the mud; the background is dark but everything the girl touches is smudged with light. It gradually becomes clear over the course of the film that this girl is leaving food for the prisoners working in the fields, in her small way trying to alleviate the suffering. She is, in fact, based on Aleksandra Kolodziejczyk, a real-life member of the Polish resistance, whom Glazer met shortly before she died in 2016, and to whom he dedicates his film.
Denial is a very important component of the evil which drenches this film. You can almost smell it. Every now and again one of the children raises the thick net curtain over a bedroom window and gazes outwards, only to drop the curtain abruptly. When Hedwig’s working class mother comes to stay, she congratulates her daughter on the comfortable, supremely bourgeois circumstances of her life: a big house, servants, expensive dogs, cars. Höss has a beautiful, shining horse he likes to ride around the camp, as if he is some sort of Tolstoyan aristocrat on his estate. But when the mother finally raises the net curtain of her bedroom one night and sees the flames spiralling skywards from the crematorium chimneys, enough is enough, and she disappears without saying goodbye.
At breakfast, when a petrified servant cannot find her mother, Hedwig, in a fit of rage, tells her that her husband could have her ashes spread over the fields. Hedwig knows. The children who sleepwalk and play with teeth in their bunk beds know. The baby knows. The dog knows. Everyone knows. And it is this tension between denial and knowing that makes the tone of the film increasingly fraught.
In the final scenes of the film, at the HQ where Höss has gone to discuss expansion plans with other Nazi bigwigs, we see him – no tail, no horns, a solitary, uniformed, almost banal figure descending the stairs into the darkness – suddenly, shockingly pausing to cough up his guts on the marble steps. The body keeps the score. He knows. And the film’s final, deliberately trite, almost domestic scenes of staff sweeping out the ovens at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum today means that we, also, all now know.
<em>Finally appearing to accept and recognise the enormity of his crimes, Rudolph Höss was reconciled to the Church on his deathbed and before his execution.</em>
<strong><strong>This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click</strong> <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">here</mark></a>.</strong>
