The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s fourth feature does something that most Holocaust films refuse to attempt: it withholds. There are no gas chambers depicted, no selections, no deportations. There is a wall. On one side of the wall is a garden with flowers and a swimming pool and children playing. On the other side is Auschwitz. We never see what is on the other side of the wall. We don’t need to.

The film follows Rudolf Höß (Christian Friedel), commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, again — it was a year for her) as they tend to their domestic paradise. Hedwig plants roses. The children catch frogs in the river. Rudolf commutes to work. The horror is entirely offscreen, present only as sound — the industrial murmur, the occasional gunshot, the grey smoke that drifts over the garden wall — while the camera watches the family with the detached, surveillance-style flatness of a home video camera that has no moral position.

The Ethics of Distance

Glazer has spoken about wanting to make a film about the perpetrators rather than the victims — a choice that carries obvious risk. The risk is the one Hannah Arendt identified: that representing the banality of evil too faithfully might normalise it. Glazer’s answer is the film’s formal strategy itself. By refusing to dramatise, by draining affect from the framing, by treating the Höß household as the subject of documentary observation rather than narrative identification, he creates a distance that is itself the argument. We watch these people live. We are disgusted by how easily they live. The distance is not comfort — it is accusation.

The sound design by Johnnie Burn may be the most important creative decision in the film. The ambient noise of the camp is constant, textured, specific. It is not a score. It is not designed to cue emotion. It is simply there, as it would have been there for the people who lived next door, and who chose — as Glazer’s film insists — to hear it as background.

“Glazer is making a film about selective perception — about the human capacity to arrange one’s attention so that the unbearable remains at the edge of it.”

Hüller is given less to do here than in Anatomy of a Fall — her character is defined by her refusal to perceive — and she is brilliant in a completely different register. Hedwig’s contentment is not stupidity; it is a disciplined achievement. She has constructed an interior life that has no room for what she knows. Hüller plays this with frightening serenity.

The Intrusions

Glazer periodically breaks from his observational mode to insert sequences shot in thermal-negative, showing a local Polish girl hiding food for prisoners. These sequences are disorienting and not entirely successful — they feel imported from a different, more conventionally sympathetic film — but they serve a function: they remind us that resistance was possible, that the choice to not-see was a choice.

The film’s final minutes contain a structural shift I won’t describe. It is the right ending. It is also, coming after 100 minutes of controlled austerity, genuinely shocking in its directness.

The Zone of Interest is an uncomfortable masterpiece. It is the kind of film that you carry with you afterward not because it has given you images to remember but because it has refused to.