The Banality of Atrocity rumbles through Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” (2024)

The title “modern classic” has the tendency to elicit eye rolls and contrarianism, but in our post-modern landscape of worst-case-scenarios made real, such a title is entirely fitting of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 tour de force The Zone of Interest. 

The historical drama, set in 1943, is a fly-on-the-wall insight into the life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz Birkenau, and his seemingly idyllic home – situated over the wall from the extermination camp. The film’s relatively domestic plot is matched by bold, bleak cinematography that serves as a constant reminder of its perversity. 

Glazer’s film hijacks the senses, arresting the impulse to look away or cover our ears, as we are so accustomed to doing today across temporal or geographical distances. The bold, impenetrable opening sets the precedent for The Zone of Interest: Listen. 

Both the opening and closing are standouts of the film: Mica Levi’s sparse yet sonorous score is the stuff of nightmares, infusing the opening with the dread of what is to come, and the ending with the dread of reality itself. The first scene in particular gives the auditory illusion of descent, scoring a black screen, as if to suggest that we are descending through time, beneath darkness itself, and into something wholly more foul. The duration of the scene allows for the transformation from the eye of the viewer into an eye into the house itself. It relies on our knowledge of the Holocaust to strike a profound chord – the mind may fight to make sense of the sound and the darkness, but it simply must be felt. It is for this particular reason that this film must be viewed in complete darkness. My own experience watching the film late at night for the first time, alone and without any lights on, enhanced every aspect of the film, such that once it was over, the absence of sound was deafening and the familiar darkness of my home was all at once encroaching and distinctly darker than before. While it may be tempting to sleep with a light on, or distract oneself from the silence, it is precisely what makes The Zone of Interest so formidable. 

Glazer’s sensory assault is a bombardment of evil that acts as a kind of looking glass. By projecting evil in its simplest, most salient form, we the viewers are made participants of a contemporary evil: the licence of looking away. Indeed, what sets the film apart from the pantheon of historical dramas concerning the Holocaust is the obscurity of its evil, behind the garden wall of the Höss family home, across whose expanse a grapevine clings. In essence, the film reshapes what we perceive to be evil: are the Höss family children culpable, as we watch them play with their toys or swim in the pool?  

What is perhaps most horrifying about Glazer’s film is the banality of the background noise coming from the camp itself. Throughout the film there are distant bangs that on the surface are mere gunfire, but the viewer engages their own knowledge of the history to fill in the negative space. The experience of catching yourself desensitised to the gunfire elicits a guilt unequalled by any historical drama to date. Glazer has his finger on the pulse of our acclimatisation to the atrocities that dominate global news. When there seems to be so little hope of change, it is projects like The Zone of Interest that show us what evil truly looks like. 

In essence, Glazer draws the viewer, however resistant, to view the world in line with its Nazi protagonists: Director of Photography Lucas Zal said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter they wanted the film to feel like ‘Big Brother in a Nazi House.’ To achieve such an effect, the film was shot and acted out in real time, in the absence of any crew inside the house: the effect is a fluency that lends itself to the realisation of history on screen. Activities like preparing dinner and playing in the swimming pool are overhung with a visual and audible assault on the senses: be it the sound of shouting, gunfire, the sight of smoke over the garden wall, or the persistent rumble of the furnaces – so constant a sound, you only notice it when it’s gone. The domestic issues of the Höss family naturally attract the concern of the viewer, in particular the prospect of having to move houses, despite the care Hedwig Höss has put into making a proper home, complete with a lush garden. The film’s fly on the wall approach gives the film a dollhouse effect, diminishing the evil of its characters to a disturbingly banal degree: any investment with the domestic conflict of the film is visually and audibly undercut by the main character: the camp itself. 

In this sense, the aforementioned darkness over the garden wall is in the ‘eye’ of the beholder: be it, the Höss children being too young to see nor understand the horrors surrounding them (with one stand-out scene showing the eldest Höss child examining a prisoner’s loose teeth, as though they were figurines or marbles), or the women of the household carrying out their domestic duties with careful, myopic consideration. Night scenes are notably horrifying: the silence of the house at rest only enhances the relentless suffering of the camp.  

It is impossible to refute the pinpoint accuracy with which Glazer released this project. In light of worldly atrocities that seem virtually bygone in their cruelty and magnitude, it is with wide and receptive eyes that we watch The Zone of Interest and ascend out of the darkness with a new, fundamentally shaken perspective on the crime of looking away. It is in times of unfathomable injustice that the potency of cinema is at its strongest. The sight and sound of the screen shatters to arrest the senses: the odour of atrocity is most pungent when those committing them are unchallenged, and it is for that reason that The Zone of Interest is a breath of fresh air that renews faith in the political power of cinema. 

Common criticisms I have heard from those I’ve recommended the film to have been that it was boring or too slow for their liking, but therein lies the catch. The viewer has the privilege of witnessing this window of time from a distance, and for a concise 1 hour and 45 minutes. The fact this film packs so much into a runtime under 2 hours is nothing short of masterful. 

The qualifications for what makes a modern classic are markedly vague and subject to whoever you are asking, but perhaps the qualifier is the degree to which it tackles a seemingly unconquerable facet of the human condition with arresting honesty.  

Put simply, if there is one film that should be compulsory viewing for anyone with a conscience, it is The Zone of Interest. Glazer reshapes our understanding of evil by dissolving the temporal distance between the viewer and the characters. The banality of atrocity rumbles throughout the film and by its end, we are aware that the life of the Höss family is just a drop in the vast and very real history of the enabled evil. If not for its remarkable historical accuracy, or the razor-sharp performances, then this film must be watched for the effect of its final moments, and the dreadful return of Levi’s score, raising us out of the darkness and back into present day. 

Edited by Matthew Palatnik.