‘The Zone Of Interest’ Review – Jonathan Glazer’s Commitment To Banality Renders His Holocaust Drama Devoid Of Insight [TIFF 2023]

On the outskirts of Lublin, one of the largest cities in Poland, the concentration camp Majdanek towers as a monument to the terrors of the Holocaust. Now a museum, it is well-known for remaining almost 100% intact from when it was last operating in 1944. Walking the camp is the equivalent of stepping into a life-size diorama, an eerie portal into the past that no other Holocaust museum, even the frequented Auschwitz, can replicate. If you look closely enough into the gas chamber, you can almost see the ghosts of those who perished.

However, more striking than all of this – somehow – is what lies beyond the camp’s borders. In a very rare case, Majdanek is also well-known for being incredibly visible to the public. In fact, apartment buildings sit right next to the camp, some of them with balconies directly overlooking the killing fields and gas chambers. Though some were clearly built after the war, the fact remains that many Polish citizens lived comfortably with atrocity happening literally in their own backyard. Many seem to still be comfortable living in its lingering shadow, but how could such a thing exist in any world?

Jonathan Glazer attempts to reckon with this question in his new Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest, his long-awaited return following 2013’s lauded Under The Skin. Starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, the film depicts the idyllic family life of a German family living directly next to Auschwitz at the height of its destruction. The father, Rudolf Höss (Friedel, portraying a real-life Nazi officer), is the commandant of the camp and a respected leader amongst the SS. His wife, Hedwig (Hüller), raises their four children while maintaining the house. They play, they garden, they host pool parties, all safely confined behind a tall, barbed-wire wall. Pillars of gas chamber smoke merely linger in the rearview.

It’s a naturally shocking juxtaposition, at least at first. Glazer chooses to leave explicit violence off-screen and most present in the film’s engrossing sound design. Gunshots and screams are so constant throughout that they become a layer of white noise. Additionally, observational cinematography by legendary Polish filmmaker Łukasz Żal makes this horror intentionally cut and dry. The majority of the film’s visual identity is made up of chromatically-dulled, deep focus static shots that feel reminiscent of security footage. The camera tries just as hard to hide the realities of the Holocaust as Rudolf and Hedwig do for their own children, and the result is an achievement in the meticulously humdrum.

All of this is in service of Glazer’s meditation on the banality of evil, but the obvious dichotomy becomes so repetitive that it begins to feel like a gimmick. Glazer skewers every trope of nuclear family life to the point of parody and very few moments are actually chilling beyond that. Some moments are so on the periphery that nothing cinematic registers at all. It’s admirable that Glazer stays away from cheap thrills or shock value in a genre full of exploitation, but his neutral and “more realistic” portrayal of the Nazis feels self-satisfied in its contrarianism. By ignoring the violence, Glazer thinks he is invoking insight, but he is actually flattening the complexity of a group of people who were inescapably, irrevocably, proudly, and happily violent. Rudolf Höss killing Jews was as quotidian to him as his morning breakfast yet Glazer refuses to show it, believing it would complicate the portrayal. Frankly, there’s nothing complicated about it for them, so why shouldn’t we see it for ourselves?

In fact, the closer the film engages the characters in the violence, the more successful it becomes. After Rudolf takes his children to the river, he is shocked when the downstream current begins washing them in the remains of Jewish bodies. He frantically grabs his children and takes them home, where they are cleaned with vigor. “Don’t worry, you’ll live,” one maid says. It is in these moments that even just a glimmer of repercussion brings out greater complexity and stakes in its characters, something Glazer could have continued expanding on without sacrificing his vision of banality.

Instead, Glazer breaks his formality in experimental modes, the majority of which simply lack tact and immersion. At one point, Glazer and Żal use bizarre thermal imaging to portray a young local girl leaving hidden apples for Jews working at the camps. Beyond the film not bothering to explore who she is or what she is doing there, the thermal imaging is a naked way of making the non-banal still seem sinister when, if anything, it’s just silly. Mica Levy’s score is sprinkled throughout the film but never evokes new insight into the film. Their music underscores the beginning of the film, over two minutes of just a black screen. Audiences will be quicker to think the projector is broken than to glean any insight from such a confounding artistic decision.

Many people walk the stone pavements of Auschwitz today, the very ground that Rudolf Höss overlooked every day. For most, it is a traditional, if especially harrowing, museum: walls adorned with explanatory text, glass cases of recovered artifacts, people comfortably learning about Jewish violence without feeling anything resembling fear. For this critic, it is a hollow, cold, thoroughly uninsightful experience that does more to perpetuate the commodification of the Holocaust than to actually instill the terror Jews faced day in and day out. Glazer’s film feels similar. It will remind people of the horror but never make them watch it, to feel comfortable in the knowledge of their own complacency without actually confronting it. Perhaps for some people, this is a thoughtful meditation. For people who are in constant remembrance of this horror, it simply evokes nothing we didn’t already know.

The Zone of Interest held its Canadian premiere as part of the Special Presentations section at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. It is set to be released on December 8, 2023, courtesy of A24.