The Zone of Interest

By Joanna Langfield

Jonathan Glazer’s drama, spare and unforgiving, is, in surprising ways, one of the most stunning films I’ve seen about the Holocaust.

Drawn from Martin Amis’s book, this is the unsparing look at a German family striving for a better life. It just so happens that the key to that better life comes with a remarkable job opportunity, as the father is made commandant of the death camp Auschwitz. They get a big, beautiful house. With gardens. A pool. Housemaids. They’ve made good. Even with those incessant sounds and smells from over the adjacent wall.

Glazer presents this in a manner that is icily searing. The ambitious Rudolf appears to view all of this, even the chance to massacre hundreds of thousands of new Jewish prisoners in the state of the art gas chambers he is so proud of, as career opportunities. He is a man of deliberate intensity, careful to turn off the lights at night, to wipe away the remains of his sexual insistence with that seemingly disembodied Jew. His wife? She’s more upfront. She and the Nazi officer wives giggle over the fate of others. She remains steadfast, not so much to her husband, but to the life they have climbed their way to. Even when her mother wonders about the Jewish woman whose house she used to clean, Hedwig prefers to prance in front of a mirror, casting a critical eye toward the fur coat her husband has brought home for her. We know how she got that coat. And so does she.

Throughout, we hear what the family seems to not, the persistent sound of despair and fury. We may not be breathing the toxic air that billows consistently into their perfect lives, but we see it. And that, bloodless as it is, is devastating.

Christian Friedel and particularly Sandra Huller are unforgettable, capturing the soullessness that must have explained so much of the times’ evil. And Glazer, while he counterpoints the amorality with scenes of a local girl, trying to smuggle food to the prisoners, is adamant in his insistence we witness those who made such a holocaust possible. This is a piece of art that does, and should, haunt us.