The Zone of Interest may depict Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) with creeping inference, but director Jonathan Glazer is straighter about his subject than Martin Amis, who wrote the novel upon which this film is based. Whereas Amis fictionalised Höss as ‘Paul Doll’ and placed him in a love triangle that never happened, Glazer depicts the commandant and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) closer to how they really were — banal functionaries.
Rudolf and Hedwig live with their five children in a house on the edge of Auschwitz concentration camp. Frau Höss takes great pride in her home and especially her garden, cultivating vegetables and flowers in pots, beds and trellises. Hedwig seems unbothered by the walls and barracks that tower over her petty domain and she shows little concern for the hum of distress that emanates from the camp, even the screams and gunshots. Rudolf is unmoved, too, coasting along in his SS garb as if he was an ordinary prison governor.
Glazer depicts this aberrant milieu with a ‘slow cinema’ style that infers Nazi horror with gazing cinematography and eerie acoustics. We may see images of gas chambers and summary execution, but they’re in our head, not on the screen. The Zone of Interest is not a visceral experience like The Pianist, for example, with its jarring cruelty and urban combat. It is instead an unnervingly empty experience, much like visiting Auschwitz itself, as I did some eight years ago. The shoes, suitcases and gas chambers are a monument to a crime so massive that one feels curiously hollow, and these feelings are mixed further by crass tourists and even the errands of museum staff, which Glazer’s film captures in a cut to the present day that shows cleaners polishing windows and mopping floors like they would in a school or office building. Auschwitz museum should be clean, of course, but there is something uncanny about how even the Holocaust can become so banal.
However, in depicting Rudolf Höss as a man who directed one million murders out of careerism rather than pathology, The Zone of Interest suggests that from a top-down perspective, Auschwitz was always a banal institution run not by the clawed demons of propaganda but by euphemising, group-thinking bureaucrats.
