The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer 2023

Like Jonathan Glazer's previous works - the mediocre Sexy Beast (2000), the intriguing Birth (2004), and the occasionally striking but largely risible Under the Skin (2013) - his latest leaves little doubt as to its sense of its own importance. If the extended black screens which follow the opening title and precede the end credits were not enough, the gravity proper to the proceedings emphatically weighs in via the discordant score (sparingly used and quite effective) and the largely static camera à la Haneke; though even at his finger-wagging worst Haneke is a good deal more businesslike than Glazer has ever deigned to be. There are monochrome segments as well, conflating the Holocaust's victims with the protagonists of the fairy-tales Rudolf reads to his children, which fairly scream forth the profundity of the enterprise.

The premise of The Zone of Interest, an apparently loose adaptation of a Martin Amis novel, is well known by now: Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five children carry on a commonplace bourgeois existence next door to the slave labour and extermination camp at Auschwitz, where Rudolf is commandant. Business meetings and birthday celebrations are held; work-related domestic complications arise and are negotiated; dogs and children frolic and annoy and are disciplined and paraded; all with the Final Solution no more than a wall's breadth away, and well within earshot.

Some little time ago I submitted that from our present moral heights the Holocaust might most honestly be viewed from the perspective of its perpetrators; and Glazer has justified The Zone of Interest on much the same grounds: "It's trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims." If that really is what The Zone of Interest is trying to be, then it isn't trying terribly hard. From his SS undershirt and criminally insane haircut to her disciplining a house-slave with the threat of cremation and scattering, the film's treatment of Rudolf and Hedwig adopts the crudest devices to distance and dissociate itself and its audience from the couple. At one point Hedwig takes her mother on a tour of the large, perfect garden, chatting about how she manages it all and swiftly deflecting any reference to those people next door; this effectively uneasy scene is followed by increasingly close shots of the flowers, which culminate at last in the ENTIRE SCREEN turning BLOOD RED. Like the later sequence in the present-day Auschwitz museum, this exhibits a subtlety and a respect for the audience's intelligence well worthy of Martin Amis, whose strenuously postmodernistic echt-Nabokonovel London Fields includes a charitable name-check (Transparent Things, if memory speaks true) for the benefit of anyone not au fait with the heights at which he was aiming.

One or two interesting touches do emerge to hint at zones a little less cosily self-complacent. Scenes such as the distribution of recycled clothing to the servants ("only one each") seamlessly blend the wartime virtues of domestic thrift with the material wages of genocide. The repeated nightly extinguishing of the lights chez Höss makes a telling contrast with the perpetually sunlit exteriors and the antiseptic brightness in the halls of officialdom; although I couldn't help recalling that Kubrick's Dr Strangelove managed a related if more subtly wrought effect with the closing of a few blinds.

In Joachim Fest's The Face of the Third Reich, the chapter on Höss is titled "The Man from the Crowd." The real Höss prided himself on his obedience and self-sacrifice: he sincerely deplored the brutalities of the Auschwitz guards, and willingly co-operated with his own jailers both before and after the war. Had he existed in a civilised and humane society, he would undoubtedly have been a willing executor of civilised and humane policies. Late images of Rudolf retching over the Reich's marble stairways hint at a sublimated loathing for hard work, duty and family values; significantly, his sickness follows immediately upon his latest promotion and the promise that his domestic life will soon be resumed, and is also one of the very few times when Rudolf is seen alone. However, the film makes nothing of this beyond the standard moral condemnation implied by subsequent shots of the Auschwitz museum.

Fans and cheerleaders of the current carnage in [insert as applicable] will find little reason here to question their own motives; any more, presumably, than would the author of the source novel and The Second Plane, who proclaimed in the wake of 9/11 that Muslims should be made to "experience painful discrimination until they get tough with their children." Whatever it tries to be, The Zone of Interest is itself just one more from the crowd: one more solemn study in the evil of the banal Other, one more pompous parable of unrepentant publicans for the moral consolation of liberal Pharisees.