Review of the movie The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest, the most powerful and uncomfortable art film of the last year from British experimental filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, brings the most horrific past of human civilization (or at least one of the most horrific pasts) back to the present. We are uncomfortable, uncomfortable, and we don’t want to watch it because we don’t want the horror to return. Or we simply do not want to leave our comfort zone.

The Zone of Interest is the author’s vision of the real story of the Nazi officer Rudolf Hess, who was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. His wife and children lived in a nice house with a blooming garden just behind the fence of the round-the-clock death machine. From his family’s nest, he could get to his office through an underground tunnel at any time, “do his work” and return to his warm bedroom bed or the table in the kitchen laid with goodies.

What does Glazer do in the frame that his predecessors, who also made films about the Holocaust, did not do? He doesn’t show the Holocaust. Not at all. But it is precisely because of this very absence that he makes us feel it most acutely. One can recall that the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes did not show the genocide in the Nazi camps in his 2015 film Son of Saul, but that was different. Nemes filmed murders, burnings, gas poisoning, and surgical dissections… and put everything in the frame, but… he obscured the protagonist with the closest possible shot (mostly the back and the back of the head). Glazer, on the other hand, doesn’t film anything. Nothing that happens in Auschwitz. He captures on camera only the “peaceful” family life of Rudolf, his wife Jadwiga, and their children. In other words, he does not obscure the horrors, but replaces them. He shows one story and at the same time tells a completely different one.

It tells the story with sounds. While in the frame, Jadwiga (the main European actress of 2023, Sandra Güller, who stunned the Cannes film community with her simultaneous performance of two fundamentally different and yet in some ways similar characters: The wife and mother from Area of Interest and the wife and mother from Grey’s Anatomy) admires the flowers in her garden or has a barbecue by the pool, screams, cries, gunshots, and barking dogs come from behind the barbed wire fence. And even when it seems to be quiet, you can still hear the flames humming and crackling, day and night… But the “heroes” of this “idyll” hear birdsong instead of screams, and instead of the stench of burning flesh, they smell the aromas of hibiscus and peonies. The question is: are they pretending or do they really hear what they want to hear?

Glazer immediately and categorically denies the main justifying argument of the so-called indirect evil (evil that always stands next to the direct evil and does nothing): “we didn’t know.” It denies this not only for women (wives, mothers, daughters, sisters of the Nazis), as Jadwiga and other Germans wear the clothes of the murdered Jews and wear their jewelry, but even for Nazi children who play with soldiers and… someone’s teeth without asking their parents any questions. And it makes the audience think about justifying themselves: what if we removed those uncomfortable voiceovers and left only the pure contemplation of sunny days, picnics and roses, would we regain our sense of comfort and peace, even knowing (but not hearing or seeing) what is happening behind the fence?..

If you have the Garden of Eden right under your nose, who will pay attention to the hell behind the fence? And even more so, no one (well, most people) will think about the fact that for not paying attention to hell after death they will go to… hell. The worst thing is that Jonathan Glazer made a movie not about the Nazis, but about all of us. It is not about the Holocaust as a terrible exception to the rules of history, but rather about the unchanging human nature and historical regularity.

The director does not justify himself either. That is, he fully accepts and even emphasizes his detachment (not as an artist, but as an ordinary person) from other people’s pain. This alienation, this detachment, this distancing is demonstrated by the distant objective camera, which does not experience any emotions, but only transcribes primitive, primitive, basic egoism. And Glazer, unlike Spielberg, does not need to resort to visual and psychological manipulations with the red coat on the Jewish girl in the black-and-white image. Because, like Malevich, he can afford to simply fill the entire screen with red or black, to simply show an eloquent (more eloquent than any shot children’s toy) square, a clearly defined perimeter of the zone of interest.