Chicago International Film Festival 2023 Review: The Zone of Interest
Chances are anyone who chooses to view “The Zone of Interest” believes they know what they’ve signed up for, but be warned. Director Jonathan Glazer still insists you think about why we’re here, and the results are some of the most chilling you’ll ever see.
Our current times have given us a plethora of on-screen depictions of the beautiful and privileged who recline in their insulated cocoon of wealth and decadence while the world burns. It’s typically not where the average viewer expects to see themselves, not when such extremes of entitlement make the affluent seem almost inhuman in their smiling obliviousness.
And it’s hard to beat the Holocaust for extremes, when the worst of humanity was on display for the world to see. But Glazer insists we see ourselves in such specimens. Or more accurately, our own capacity for complicity as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children go about their lives in their idyllic home right next to the camp.
Plantations, after all, are also rich with aesthetic beauty. For “The Zone of Interest,” the euphemism Nazi leadership used for the Auschwitz area, Glazer filmed right on location in Poland, and he keeps the camera at a cool remove to capture its beautiful summer countryside as Höss and his immaculately blonde brood, clad in white, frolic in their dreamy pastoral surroundings. Eventually those wide shots include the barbed wire, the smoke, and the sounds of the machinery of death, all of which are ignored by the family with an ease that’s as inescapable as a noose tightening.
The cruel indifference is such that when Höss’s work is rewarded with a promotion that requires his transfer to a different location, Hedwig refuses to leave on the grounds that they’re living the ideal life they’ve always wanted, with an abundance of riches on their very doorstep. Her husband hasn’t dubbed her the Queen of Auschwitz for nothing, and she’s a horror in her own right who is well matched by her mass murdering spouse.
As the details add up, which include matter-of-fact discussions of how to dispose of the increasing number of corpses, the mechanics of the chimney and more efficient gas chambers, the centerpiece is a sequence wherein Hedwig gives her mother Sophie (Stephanie Petrowitz) a tour of their stately garden while the two matter-of-factly marvel at its beauty and achievements while the sounds of the camp echo in the distance.
With that kind of ambience, Glazer keeps Mica Levi’s remarkably haunting score to a minimum, with visual deviations such as a family maid leaving food for prisoners recorded in ghostly night vision feeling every bit like the stuff of heroic fairy tales that serve as the voiceover. The devil is in the details, and the true banality of evil might just lie in our collective silence.
Grade: A+
