A glimpse of domestic Nazi life at Auschwitz

As antisemitism surges around the world, it makes sense to look back at other times in history when Jew-hatred flared up, notably the Holocaust, so Jonathan Glazer’s new movie, The Zone of Interest, which opens in theaters around Israel on Thursday, could not be timelier. It focuses on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children, who lived a comfortable life in a walled compound with a lovely garden on the death camp’s grounds.

Loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, it’s a brilliantly done but coldly formal look at this family’s life, and if watching it is a creepy, unsettling experience, that’s undoubtedly what the director, Jonathan Glazer, intended. Glazer made the striking science-fiction movie Under the Skin (2013), in which Scarlett Johansson played an alien who visits earth to lure men back to her world; ultimately, she is destroyed by human cruelty just as she learns compassion. Glazer has a talent for looking at the world through an outsider’s eye, and he showed very effectively how the alien heroine was struck by all that is both harsh and enticing in ordinary modern life.

In The Zone of Interest, the Höss family are the insiders, the ordinary humans, and we are the alien outsiders being given a glimpse of the life of a not untypical, privileged family, but one that dwells in the shadow of one of the greatest horrors in human history and that was nourished by these horrors. It brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil,” in which she wrote about the Adolf Eichmann trial, commenting that Eichmann seemed an ordinary man notwithstanding the mass slaughter for which he was responsible.

The Zone of Interest could certainly be taken as a further illustration of Arendt’s concept, as this family’s life is so banal that it makes you search for any glimpse of evil you can find; otherwise, you may find yourself noticing how dull all this banality is. You need to see signs of that evil to remind yourself that there is a point to watching this German family eating their meals, Hedwig showing off her garden and serving coffee and cake to her friends, or even Rudolf Höss himself at bureaucratic conferences that seal the fate of thousands of death camp inmates.

The real Höss served as the Auschwitz commandant from 1940 to 1943 and again from May 1944 to November 1945, where his experience was needed to supervise the extermination of Hungarian Jews during the so-called “Summer that Bled,” when those Jews were murdered at an extremely fast pace, requiring new methods for the disposing of their bodies. It was Höss who implemented and supervised these changes, and the mission was named after him: Aktion Höss.

In The Zone of Interest, we see Höss at meetings, where he discusses how to step up the pace of the killings, and in these scenes, he seems more like a corporate efficiency expert who might be planning a new schedule for delivering a product to supermarkets than a bloodthirsty or psychopathic killer. But while Höss and his meetings are part of the film, most of the movie focuses on Hedwig and her domestic routine, and this is far creepier than the officious Nazi business we see her husband conduct. One of the ironies here is that the Nazi meetings are quite decorous, with no hint of the barbarity they are planning, while the horrors taking place just meters from Hedwig’s door slip quietly into her home. Some of the servants, of course, are inmates who live in terror, fearing that a minor infraction could get them killed, with which Hedwig threatens them at one point.

In the movie’s most commented-on scene, Hedwig receives clothes, obviously taken from arriving inmates, and whirls in front of the mirror as she tries on a fur coat. But for me, the most disturbing scene was the one where one of her little boys takes out a box and plays with some gold teeth he keeps in it, which also obviously belonged to inmates. It was an upsetting scene when I saw it at the Haifa International Film Festival just three days before the October 7 Hamas attack, and I couldn’t help but think about it again when I read that there were bodies that were so badly burned in that massacre that forensic investigators had to make identifications from a single tooth in some cases.

Because Hedwig is so insipid and her domestic concerns so trifling, the moments when we are made more aware of the horrors are almost a relief. On a family outing to the woods, a human body floats in a sun-dappled stream, and the kids have to get out of the water. Everyone’s complacency suggests that this is not the first time this has happened. But the moments in the movie that work best come not through anything that is seen but from the sounds, mainly at night, when they hear the trains arriving, dogs barking, Jews screaming, and shots being fired.

The Zone of Interest, which won the Grand Prize at Cannes, was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and the two it is expected to win are Best International Feature and Best Sound; in fact, this is one of the only movies where I have ever really been aware of the sound design. Those nocturnal scenes, during which we hear the death camp killing machine, are far scarier than almost any fictional depiction of the Holocaust could ever be because, when you just hear it and imagine it, you don’t get distracted by thinking that the inmates look too clean or what other movies these actors have appeared in – inherent disadvantages of fictional depictions of the Nazi horror. The sounds give you a vivid understanding of what it must have been like to be there.

The movie seemed uncharacteristically fantasy-like

THE ONE ELEMENT that doesn’t quite fit is the fairy tale-style scenes, filmed in black-and-white thermal imaging, of a girl hiding apples during the night, apparently in the woods. Was she one of the Höss children, hiding them so inmates could find them and eat? Was it a dream of one of the characters? We can only guess.

As The Zone of Interest goes on, the authenticity of the banality takes its toll on the movie – and on us. The only plot concerns whether Höss will be transferred to a different post, a prospect that horrifies his wife, who doesn’t want to leave her garden or lose access to all the booty stolen from prisoners, and that’s not a lot of plot for a 105-minute movie. While you might be hoping it will jump forward to the end of the war – Hoss was found guilty of war crimes by a Polish tribunal and hanged at Auschwitz in 1947 – it never does. The idea of looking at the lives of those feeding off the concentration camp is good, but it’s unpleasant to watch these people for the entire running time, and it’s unpleasantness with no payoff. We know they are vile the moment we see them, and they remain just as vile, in all the same ways, through to the end. I wonder if it would have worked better as a much shorter film.

Banality can perhaps be best appreciated in brief doses.