Review of The Zone of Interest (2023)
Seen in 2024.
In 1943, Linna Hensel goes to live with her daughter, Hedwig, and Hedwig’s five children. Hedwig’s husband Rudolf runs a camp in occupied Poland, at Auschwitz. On an intellectual level, Linna knows that, but she doesn’t know what it’s like to sleep just outside the wall when the crematoria fire up so hard that flames shoot out of their chimneys and give colour to the night sky. The garden is wonderful, the soil fertile with ash. Hedwig and Rudolf have their own pool, with a slide and everything, for the children.
The style is less realistic than I had expected, and that is probably a good thing. The script, the acting, the construction work, the set dressing etc. are all naturalistic and meticulously executed, and there is no melodic score, but there are intrusive extradiegetic sounds, fades, night-time sequences shot in infrared, and so on. There is no violence on screen. Emaciated prisoners are barely glimpsed on their way to do some forced labour. At the end, dry heaving on his way out of an SS facility at Oranienburg to return to Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss almost breaks through the fourth wall, as if he’d just witnessed the same cut to custodial staff at the modern Auschwitz Museum as the audience did.
The phrase “zone of interest” is a literal translation of Interessengebiet, the euphemistically named geographical area where the real Höss family lived. The limitation of the film’s subject to that area, between normality and naked brutality, is its least realistic feature. It provides for a brilliant treatment of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, of psychological accommodation, and of bourgeois status-seeking stripped down to its core, all without the crassness of more explicit, victim-focused holokitsch.