Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Zone of Interest’ on VOD, an Unblinking Stare at the Banality of Evil

Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make feature films very often, but when he does, we get an unforgettable work like The Zone of Interest (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). The acclaimed director of Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin spent years researching and preparing to make this banality-of-evil story about Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commandant who was not only in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp, but also lived immediately next door to it. Seeking to remove as much of the “artifice of filmmaking” as possible, Glazer set up multiple static cameras inside a detailed replica of Hoss’ home – built very close to the real thing, which still stands – and let his cast simply “exist” in the set, the Hoss family going about its suburban routine while the sounds of genocide creep over a fence and into their idyllic garden. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Director, and stands, like so many Holocaust films before it, as one those movies you’ll appreciate on many levels, and be glad that you’ve seen, but probably will never want to see again.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Location, location, location. Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller, Oscar nominee for Anatomy of a Fall) Hoss don’t live in an extravagant home, but it’s still beautiful. Their daughters’ room is cozy and bright, Rudolf’s office is stately and the dining room is grand. The piece de resistance, though, is the garden, which is Hedwig’s pride – it stretches across a few parcels, and includes a pool for the children to play in, a broad diversity of flowering plants (including towering rows of sunflowers) and a sprawling greenhouse. We first meet the Hoss family as they look excessively pale in the sunlight along the bank of a lake. It’s a gorgeous day. They’ve taken their two sons, two daughters and baby for a swim and picnic. By the time they get home, the crickets are chirping in the twilight, the soothing warble blending in with the not-quite-distant sounds of gunshots, screaming, diesel engines and other sounds of the industry of systematic genocide.

It’s Rudolf’s birthday. The children are thrilled to gift him a three-person kayak, so new, the paint’s still fresh. He puts the baby in it and laughs that she’ll have a green bottom. All the officers from the Auschwitz camp gather outside Rudolf’s back door to wish him a happy birthday; higher-ups will meet inside his home office later to go over the blueprints for their new highly efficient mass-cremation system. When he has a rare day off, he takes two of the kids to the nearby Soln for a spin in the kayak. As they swim and he wades into the river with his fishing rod, he steps on something. It’s a human jawbone. He dashes from the water and rushes the children home, where the nanny and housekeeper scrub them in the bathtub, cleaning off any remnants of ash. At nighttime, Rudolf makes the rounds, turning off lights and locking doors. In one bedroom, he and Hedwig giggle and laugh quietly in their twin-sized beds, separated by a nightstand; in another, their elder son lays in bed with a flashlight, sifting through a box of gold teeth.

Hedwig’s mother arrives for a visit, her first at the Auschwitz house. Hedwig gives her a guided tour of the garden – a “paradise garden,” her mother labels it – and they sit near a lovely pergola, not hearing, or pretending not to hear, the grinding sounds of the industry of death churning mere yards away, on the other side of a tall privacy fence topped with barbed wire like Christ’s crown of thorns. They host a party and we get a shot of the children splashing in the pool as we see plumes of smoke progressing across the horizon from a train arriving at the camp; from the opposite angle, the brick buildings that house gas chambers and furnaces loom ominously. As they sit poolside, Rudolf tells Hedwig that he’s been so successful at overseeing Auschwitz, he’s been promoted from commandant to deputy inspector. They’ll have to relocate to Oranienburg in Germany. Hedwig is incensed. Have you seen her garden? Have you seen how happy the children are? This is their dream, she argues, and it’s even better than they ever thought it’d be. Why would anyone ever want to leave this?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: File The Zone of Interest next to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon among modern cinema’s most miserably effective examinations of the worst of humanity.

Performance Worth Watching: Between this and Anatomy of a Fall, 2023 marked an extraordinary year for Huller. Both films gave her a platform to explore compellingly thorny moral gray areas; in The Zone of Interest, her characterization is all about fascinatingly superhuman feats of compartmentalization. 

Memorable Dialogue: Rudolf takes his son for a horseback ride through the woods. As the sounds of the Auschwitz camp creep into the scene, Rudolf points something out to the boy: “Do you hear that? It’s a bittern. A Eurasian gray heron.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Zone of Interests opens with a black screen and an ambient-music overture, functioning as a palate cleanser for what we’re about to see: A family going about its daily business. Boys play with toy soldiers, the nanny sits with her head in her hands as the baby wails in the wee hours, women chat over tea, a father reads his daughters a bedtime story. But one of the boys wears the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The sound of furnaces belching smoke and flame have awakened the child. The women casually discuss acquiring a dress from a “Jewess.” The story is Hansel and Gretel, and we specifically hear the part about the children pushing the witch into the oven.

Sometimes, we have to block out troublesome thoughts just to get through the workday and put dinner on the table and get the kids to bed. But the Hoss family is a different story. The children are collateral damage, while the adults function on a different level, especially Hedwig. While her husband ventures to the other side of the fence daily, she doesn’t, and prompts us to wonder whether complicity or indifference is worse. Most people get used to the best and worst of new surroundings; having acclimated to living in boiling water, Rudolf and Hedwig have become truly inhuman. Cue a crushingly prosaic scene: Rudolf makes a phone call, dictating a memo to camp workers. He wants them to please be conscious of not destroying the lilac bushes while picking flowers. We recognize the crass irony of the moment. Does he?

Glazer never shows us what happens on the other side of the fence. He doesn’t have to – we’ve seen it in Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, Son of Saul and others. In this film, though, the idea that what’s in our imagination is more terrifying than what we witness firsthand holds true as ever. The cinematography functions as a harsh staredown, as if the camera is trying to will its subjects to recognize reality, to self-reflect. The director tells parallel stories: The one we see, a quasi-observational family drama, austere and unblinking. And the one we hear, a horror story and condemnation of these characters (for this reason, the film is nominated for a best sound Oscar). These narratives intersect so frequently in our minds, because we’re not evil, and we try to will it to happen to Hedwig and Rudolf, perhaps because we value redemption stories, even when there are none.

Not all of the film is chillingly astringent. Glazer deviates from the static camera/natural light formality in a few scenes depicting Polish Jews whose faces go largely unseen: A girl, shot with reverse-negative photography, hides apples for starving prisoners; a lament played on a piano is subject to subtitles, instrumental music translated into words; a late-film sequence flash-forwards to present-day Auschwitz. History passes judgment. Not all is hopeless, and not all is forgotten. 

Our Call: The Zone of Interest is an exceptional film, and a difficult one to endure. The most vital stories are so often that way. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.