Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Chillingly Explores the Banality of Evil

Alci Rengifo

What is easily forgotten while discussing the horror of the Holocaust is how mass murder became just another job within the Third Reich. Many Nazi officials and soldiers simply shut off the alarms that should go off in a rational mind, carrying on because they were cogs in a system. This is what the philosopher Hannah Arendt meant when she coined the term, “the banality of evil.” Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” is a chilling reflection on that banality. It is mostly set within the walls of what looks like a dream house, with a garden and pets. Servants work the kitchen and one can enjoy tea in the shade with friends. But the wall at the edge of the garden has barbed wire, because it is actually part of the security barrier sealing off the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The source material is a novel by the late, acclaimed British novelist Martin Amis. But you can walk in without having read it. Glazer makes the story all his own, telling it with his meticulous eye for human detail. The main subject really existed. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, runs a tidy home with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children. Their home and the death camp are situated in the outskirts of Oświęcim, Poland. A pleasant river and woods sit nearby beyond the gates. This is the “zone of interest” and Rudolf tries his best to run it efficiently. He receives staff at home, gets stressed by the office and enjoys a cigar when the day winds down. Hedwig’s mother drops by to stay for a while. Architects and engineers meet with Rudolf to go over human crematorium blueprints. And even amid World War II, moving up the ladder proves challenging. 

Glazer makes such a slice of life approach to the Holocaust more unnerving than any traditional war movie. The unbelievable combines with the real in his few films. The enrapturing “Birth” featured Nicole Kidman as a wealthy New Yorker confronted by a young neighbor who claims to be her reincarnated husband. His famous “Under the Skin” featured an alluringly silent Scarlett Johansson as an alien in female form prowling human streets for potential mates. “The Zone of Interest” is his best film yet because it brings that same disoriented, dreamlike feel to something horrifyingly real. Humans are indeed the real monsters. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal does not over-stylize and sustains wide angles that almost force the audience to be witnesses. Hedwig tends to the garden, lush flowers fill the frame and we know it’s just not right. The only acknowledgement of the reality outside happens when the film switches to the look of a negative as a Polish girl searches near the camp for vegetables.

The sound design is one of the year’s best because of everything it conveys without the need of shocking images. While the kids play or the garden is tended, we can hear behind the walls of the camp the sound of horses, work and eventually, screams. Mica Levi’s score is pure atmospherics, at times screeching to frightening crescendos. What we hear gives shape to the brutality the Höss family casually lives next to. Then there are moments where Hedwig and the housekeeping staff look through items as if at some thrift store, but we know these are possessions confiscated from Jews and other prisoners at the camp. Rudolf also delights in grabbing seized cash while Hedwig greedily takes a gold lipstick. Outside it can feel like pure summer postcard happiness, complete with pool parties. The Höss home almost looks like our American ideal of the successful life. Mass murder doesn’t cause Hedwig any distress, only the possibility Rudolf might be transferred somewhere else. She advises him, like any regional manager’s wife, to “speak with Hitler.”

Like Hannah Arendt’s classic book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” what should chill viewers to the bone about “The Zone of Interest” is what it conveys about all of us. This is not merely a film about the Holocaust. Glazer has captured how fascist systems can take root anywhere precisely because of the cogs in the machine. The bureaucrats are as dangerous as the dictators because they make it all function. Rudolf’s capacity to think has been erased. He operates like a man simply doing his job. He attends meetings where Nazi commanders discuss the Final Solution with the blandness of corporate chatter. Dinner parties become suffocating bores because getting a promotion is hard work. Only Hedwig’s mother seems to feel the ominous air no one appears to contemplate. When the smell from the crematoriums makes its way to the house, nobody seems to contemplate what is going on. Yet, how often do we still turn away from terrible truths? Horrors are occurring right now in Gaza and Ukraine, with the world seemingly powerless to stop any of it, while the warlords and their acolytes plow ahead without any sense of rationalism.

Glazer’s screenplay is sparse on dialogue, with lines that ring so chillingly like Hedwig gleefully telling someone, “Rudi calls me the Queen of Auschwitz.” Remember, at that time no one is aware of how history will later define what is happening in this place. The performances are masterful because Christian Friedel (from the excellent German series “Babylon Berlin”) and Sandra Hüller play their roles with the needed near-dullness of everyday people. Because there’s nothing spectacular about these personalities, they become more eerie. Not every Nazi was a mad-eyed Wagnerian accompanying Hitler to the opera. Every system of power has such bureaucrats who only think in terms of basic ambition. If Rudolf were not part of a genocidal machine, he would be no different from any other common military man trying to impress his superiors. Likewise, Hedwig is that corporate wife whose personal wants are all invested in the state of her husband’s job. Infamous Nazis like Adolf Eichmann were just that, so frighteningly ordinary.

“The Zone Of Interest” ends with a stunningly quiet crescendo during which Glazer cuts to Auschwitz as it looks today. The camera tracks through the halls where pictures of the victims are framed as well as piles of the shoes, clothing and other items that belonged to the interned Jews. But there are no tourists, just the museum workers cleaning and vacuuming. Horror again becomes part of an everyday routine. People pass by it and it becomes so familiar, one wonders how often they ponder the magnitude or implications. How many politicians today give the orders to invade, bomb and slaughter while carrying on with bland conferences where it’s all spoken in bureaucratic language? How many of those working under them are simply looking for that next big promotion? Glazer has made one of the great recent Holocaust films because it goes to the chilling heart of the matter. It explores with clinical power how it was possible then and might be possible now.

“The Zone of Interest” releases Dec. 15 in select theaters.