The Zone of Interest opens with a gray screen and a disturbing sound of something like underwater anguish.
In a couple of minutes, a scene opens in bright sunlight at a lake; in the distance a group of people, maybe an extended family, frolic and chat – although their speech is indistinct. They look like a normal family having fun, but those early sounds put you on edge. Something isn’t right.
What’s wrong is that this is the family of Rudolf Höss, who was the actual commandant of the Auschwitz camps, but here he’s a family man, who loves his wife and children and dog, and provides for them in what’s probably an idealized Nazi life. They have a nice home, a large garden and green house, and a swimming pool. But their home abuts a big wall with barbed wire on the top, and all day long come the random sounds of gunshots, people screaming and angry dogs barking.
The Höss family pay no attention to what we know is mass murder and brutality. Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), closes herself in her bedroom to try on a new fur coat – obviously taken from a Jewish woman on her way into Auschwitz. These are not the classy people they imagine themselves to be; they’re greedy, low-rent creeps, and, of course, genocidal murderers.
During the1961 trial of Adolph Eichman, the American philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the bland affect of that man. The Zone of Interest parades the banality of this family and all their society. If it weren’t for that wall and the screams on the other side, this could be a German version of “Leave it to Beaver.” Höss seems to see himself as a guy with a good job for a company, and at a meeting, he and others talk about new efficiencies and how they can process ever more pieces than before.
The pieces, of course, are human beings whom these bland-seeming men are capturing, transporting, gassing and incinerating. But they never admit outright what they’re doing. The savagery is only implied, which makes it all the worse. Most holocaust movies show the brutalities and killings. But putting those imaginings in our minds, does something crucial – it brings the audience to feel that anyone could easily become the Höss family.
The Zone of Interest presents a picture of people who just don’t want to notice the world around them. They’ve found comfort in a world they like, and don’t want it disturbed. When her husband is ordered to take a new job which could mean moving from their little paradise, Hedwig has a fit, and she persuades him to find a way to let the family stay in their home – Dad can come home on weekends, or whatever.
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The Zone of Interest isn’t just about Jews way back then, it’s about most everyone who ignores the realities of life outside themselves, who can pretend that brutality doesn’t exist. It’s not a moralistic film; it doesn’t scold its audience, but it shows, in the most extreme circumstances, the result of living hermetically, shutting out what is just over that wall. This family doesn’t seem even to notice the wall.
But at the end of The Zone of Interest, Höss may have an inkling of that truth. It’s not certain, but it is clear what became of him.
