What Academy Award nominee Jonathan Glazer does in each of his feature films is special, but what he does in his latest film, The Zone of Interest, is masterclass work that has truly never been seen before by any director. Glazer connects the Holocaust to present day as he explores how the history we’ll study in the future are the atrocities happening right now. Many have referenced Hannah Arendt’s quote about the banality of evil when discussing the film as Glazer has removed all the visible horrors of Auschwitz and put them just beyond the screen as the film focuses instead on a Nazi family going about their daily routine just outside Auschwitz. 

To a casual viewer, we’re only watching the Höss family go about their day just as any other family, in the garden, playing with the dog, or making dinner. But this is all part of Glazer’s mission as he clearly set out to show society’s ability to not only compartmentalize evil but keep their own complicity out of the discussion. He creates an ordinary set within the confines of evil that forces the audience to reckon with the images of the Holocaust we can visualize despite Glazer never showing us throughout the film. The writer/director has said in multiple interviews about how just because the atrocities are not on screen visibly, but they should never be out of the viewer’s mind. 

Glazer and re-recording mixer / sound designer / supervising sound editor, Johnnie Burn, have spoken at length about The Zone of Interest being edited (Paul Watts) as two films, film one being a portrait of a family and film two being a horrific film set in the backdrop of the Holocaust. Something Glazer has repeated in various interviews is that film one does not inform film two. Only a director with such control, precision, and vision could effectively create these two halves to create such an experience. 

Glazer creates a film that almost feels devoid of human touch that allows the audience to look on the Höss family, not experience the film from their point of view. The director and his cinematographer Łukasz Żal set up stationary cameras to shoot the film so we go through their mundane routines while the screams and gunshots of the concentration camp ring through the film. By doing this, we’re never with the family but just complicit in their actions, which is allows for the theme of the film to truly wash over its audience. The writer/director has spoken in various interviews about how he always knew he’d make a film about the Holocaust. As someone Jewish, I understand the need and want to explore part of our history despite how bleak it is. A quote from Glazer that’s stuck with me is when talking about why he’d have interest in such a dark matter for a film and he said, “I genuinely don’t know why it’s in me. I’ve thought about it, a lot, since I started making the film. People said to me, ‘Why do you want to spend time with this imagery and this darkness?’ I’m still processing that. I’m Jewish and it’s sort of in you anyway. I don’t know why you take something on, really. I started to feel, was there something I could contribute, a corner that hadn’t been explored? I was already thinking about the perpetrator perspective but couldn’t figure out how.”

The Zone of Interest forces audiences to sit in the dark with the sounds created by Burn and score by Mica Levi before dropping us into the sun with the Höss family. While we’re in the dark, we can visualize what we’ve seen from previous Holocaust films, documentaries, and books and our eyes open anew not inside the camp, but alongside a commandant and his family responsible for the murders of millions of Jews. There’s been discussion by many who have not even seen the film of this being a dangerous point of view, but under Glazer’s hand, it’s anything but. Glazer isn’t sympathizing or making us see a different side to a Nazi bureaucrat, but seeing how these were not monsters on the outside. These were just your ordinary neighbors who committed genocide as a casual business practice. Glazer carefully walks a fine line of showing how casual the SS officers acted from, “Heil Hitler. Et cetera,” to discussing how effective a new type of crematorium would be. He’s never showing these evil people for anything but the ordinary, yet horrific people they are. 

Glazer connects the horrors of the Holocaust to everyday life, including present day. Under his masterclass direction, Glazer expertly links the horrific events of the Holocaust to the people who perpetrated them without showing us any violence on screen. He creates an experience that awakens sheer rage in its audience if they’re paying attention. The real horror is the people who see nothing at all, who feel nothing at all as they watch.

The Zone of Interest is available on demand and currently playing in select theaters. 
You can read our review of the film here.