“The Zone of Interest” Review: The Hoss’ as Human?
The Zone of Interest’s most unsettling element is everything we don’t see.
The Zone of Interest is a film that, upon hearing the synopsis, you would not want to watch. Following the Hoss family on their pristine estate that so happens to be located on the grounds of the most deadly, sickening location in history, director Johnathan Glazer has devised a visceral exploration into the darkest parts of humanity.
Despite Glazer’s visual restraint, this is not one for family movie night. By choosing to withhold humanity’s most horrific acts, the film thematically explores the relationship between the onscreen villains and the viewer. Instead of seeing the atrocities at Auschwitz, we are kept at a distance, instead left to observe something just as horrific: ourselves.
A technical and artistic marvel, The Zone of Interest introduces its main storytelling device in the beginning minutes with bone chilling effectiveness. We open on a black screen accompanied by haunting drones and sounds of hell itself. Nightmarish sonic waves that work to place the viewer in a liminal state of uncanny, desperate attempts at recognition. One may try to make sense of the terrifying sonic arrangement, but to try and make sense of anything in this film is a challenge unto itself. Never does Glazer afford the audience an opportunity at comfort, perhaps because that is the same villain that motivates our leads.
We first see the family in an idyllic wide, playing in their personal stream. The lush landscape dominates as much as the hyper perceptive, tranquil sounds of nature. But even these moments of levity are underscored by sheer intensity. The baby’s cries pierce through any chirping birds. The rushing water grows from peaceful to pounding. The Hoss family is presented as starkly as possible: black and white bathing suits, the static wide framing them from a distance, and barely a perceptible peep out of the members. Already, the film crawls under the viewers skin not through means like other exploitative Holocaust documentations do with sheer graphic imagery, but from a carefully developed, ever-present sense of unease, and the known evil tucked just meters outside of normality’s contradictory presence.
The soundscape is but one of many ways the film manages to consistently evoke such a uniquely sickly feeling. There is a twisted intrigue when watching The Zone of Interest from its intentional narrative confusion, technical restriction, and the resulting thematic debates. The cinematography somehow manages to be uncomfortably angular, clinically sterile, unsettling static, and yet, paint the Hoss household as a twisting maze of halls and doors. Quaintness becomes opulence in a land where suffering is in surplus, and for everyone besides Rudolph and Hedwig, this household is beholden to the evils that surround it. The viewer cringes at every pristine glimpse at the garden guarded by barbed wire. The children’s imaginary wars are interrupted by the wails of the one outside their door. Visitors reel at Rudolph’s prized crematorium, which looms over the family after a sequence told almost entirely through the film’s cinematic language rather than dialogue. The audience is only made aware of Hoss’ new death machine not because he cuts the ribbon at its unveiling, but because it juts out behind the wall separating him and the background screams of his victims, the camera acting like it is just coincidentally telling a story of immense magnitude with its carefully crafted visuals. In its striking imagery, The Zone of Interest demonstrates cinematography’s purpose in film as a whole: not to create a satisfying picture, but to elicit emotions in the audience by visually telling story and communicating theme.
While the presentation may trick audiences into lulls of formalism, the film never fails to test creative hypotheses. The screen fading into a deep shade of red may not make sense within the diegesis of the film, but it is undeniable that I felt exactly what that red screen was trying to convey. Similar tricks are used to amplify the already grotesque feeling any viewer would find themselves sitting with. The aforementioned never-ending, industrial soundscape. Sequences shot in thermal vision. Unconventional camera angles that refuse identification with the characters. All of these experiments, in this viewer’s opinion, are successful in execution for their thematic and emotional weight leading to thought provoking questions. Because, more than anything, I enjoyed The Zone of Interest not for its surreal visuals and haunting sounds, but the way in which it has been stuck in my head since viewing.
We are all aware of the “banality of evil,” and Glazer’s direction is component enough to recognize this. Yes, the never ending slog of being the devil incarnate is certainly an element of this film’s thematic web, but to call The Zone of Interest nothing more than a depiction of how boring being the villain is would be disrespectful on multiple levels. One of the most troubling ways in which this statement validates itself is in how that, despite the distancing, Glazer does not shy away from the sickening humanity within the film’s nuanced characters. Hedwig’s depraved greed is demonstrated in invisible ink instead of brush strokes. She dons a fur coat belonging to one of her victims. She blissfully admires her garden, as if the buzzing bees could ever drown out the cries of terror. She loves her husband deeply…that is, until her life of fortune is threatened. Then, we see the fragility, the woman hiding behind the facade of control and the shield of comfort. Hedwig is irritable, abrasive, petty and a subtle, poignant script means every word rings with inhumane power. These traits aren’t present to solidify her villainy, I think living on Auschwitz has that covered. Instead, the character’s obsession with lilacs contrasted by the ease at which they ignore their atrocities is a thematic declaration: these monsters are humans. Never does one feel bad for the Hoss family, but one can see themselves within their desperate attempts at achieving a life of comfort. A self made man performing his duties with such success that he is able to achieve his primary goal of raising a family from poverty to power; void of context, Rudolph has achieved the American dream. Greed and a never-ending desire to not be on the other side of that fence is a universal one, and the exploration of this very human desire of self-preservation creates a daring experiment in empathy. Tying theme back to cinematography, despite its constant attempts to do so, the camera cannot keep one from seeing themselves within the story.