The Zone of Interest has been described by the team behind it as two films; the film you see and the film you hear. The film you hear is honestly the most important film of all of 2023. The sound team led by re-recording mixer / sound designer / supervising sound editor, Johnnie Burn, perfectly creates a soundscape that never allows audiences to escape it despite the characters tuning it out. 

The horrors of the Holocaust are never visible to us in the Jonathan Glazer film, we can only hear the screams, gun shots, dogs barking, and cries from over the wall that borders Auschwitz and the Höss family home. While these noises permeate each frame of the film, Burn and his team effectively utilize the sounds to tell the story of not just Auschwitz and the Höss family, but the Holocaust at large and how it was able to not only begin, but go on. 

The experience of the sound in the film is perpetual as the film goes on. While the Höss family goes about their daily lives, the sounds continue and become louder and louder for the audience but not the volume level, just the intensity of the violence we know lingers behind these sounds. In many interviews, Glazer has brought up the two-film process for creating The Zone of Interest and how film one, the film you see, does not inform film two, the film you hear. These are two entirely different stories being told in different methods of storytelling. 

While sound has always been used to aid in telling a story, it’s never quite been used as strongly as it is in The Zone of Interest as a singular device for storytelling. As the film progresses, the sounds of terror from the camp become more present. The story unfolds before our eyes with the Höss family, and we follow them as our subjects, not our point-of-view in the film. As Burn has said in interviews, the sound is mixed in a method where it acts in the same manner as Glazer tells the story; we move next to the family ignoring the sounds from the camp. No matter how much you try to just look at the flowers or pay attention to the marital spat, the screams, cries, and gunshots from the camp are perpetual. 

Burn mentioned to our Artisans Editor, Jillian Chilingerian, in their discussion that while you can turn your eyes off, you can never turn your ears off. One of the most effective scenes in the film is after we listen to Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) say she’s the ‘Queen of Auschwitz,’ Glazer’s focus shifts to the garden while the sound design blasts over each shot. Not only can we hear the buzzing of bees to children laughing but we can hear the gunshots, dogs barking, and screams as both the audience and screen turn red with violence filling their mind. 

As the audience can visualize what these moments are from other films or books exploring the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest uses sound to only show these violent atrocities. The screen fills to a bright, angry red and then all sound cuts out leaving the audience to sit with the fury coursing through their body. There is no film with sound quite like Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. 

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