The Zone of Interest is a dull movie. And that’s not an insult.
In adapting the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, English director Jonathan Glazer does his best to make the lives of Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family stultifying and flat—familiar to the point of boring the audience. Rather than show fascination even as a criticism of the central characters, Glazer renders the fascists as flat, dull objects.
Several scenes illustrate this. Late in act one, the commandant’s wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) gives her mother Linna (Imogen Kogge) a tour of her home. Mother and daughter walk through the well-manicured lawn, past flowering bushes surrounding a modest pool. The two arrive at a patio and take their seats, giving space for Linna to express her admiration. With a solemn smile, Linna tells Hedwig, “You’ve landed on your feet, my love.”
The family’s father Rudolf, the real-life longest-serving commandant at Auschwitz, feels a daily struggle between domestic tranquility and the demands of the office. At home, Rudolf enjoys his downtime listening to a soccer game on the radio or taking his children fishing. At the office, he tries to be assertive and imposing, despite his wan expression and slouched posture.
Rather than show fascination even as a criticism of the central characters, Glazer renders the fascists as flat, dull objects.
Hedwig swaps gossip over drinks with neighbors when not caring for the kids. Late at night, Hedwig and Rudolf make vacation plans and share happy memories. Most of the time, Hedwig claims the rights of the domestic sphere, telling her husband late in the film that her job “is here, raising the children.”
These conversations should be familiar not just to those of The Zone of Interest’s setting in German-occupied Poland in the early 1940s, but also to modern viewers in the United States, particularly those chasing the American dream in their houses with green suburban lawns.
But two qualities of the Höss home distinguish it from anything found in the United States. One is the constant drone of fire, machinery, gunshots, and screams heard under every meal and conversation. The second is the gray concrete wall surrounding the home and separating it from the source of both the family’s financial success and the disquieting noise: the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This juxtaposition between household tedium and a horrific soundscape transforms the doldrums of The Zone of Interest into a scathing attack on its complacent viewers.
The French director Francois Truffaut, in conversation with critic Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, famously claimed that “Every film about war ends up being pro-war,” a charge he even leveled against explicitly anti-war movies such as Paths of Glory. For Truffaut, the inherently spectacular nature of cinema makes war breathtaking and exciting, even if the text of the film insists that war is hell. For example, look no further than last year’s Best Picture nominee All Quiet on the Western Front, a German production that portrays the horrors of war with all the glitz and glamor of the latest Marvel movie.
The Zone of Interest has little glitz and no glamor. Its stars, Friedel and Hüller (who was also excellent in another 2023 release, the French film Anatomy of a Fall) look like a believable, well-fed, middle-aged couple. There’s nothing showy in their performances. Hüller wrings her hands and frets over the children, while Friedel slouches and shrugs his way through life, even when presenting his findings to his Nazi superiors.
The film barely bothers with a traditional plot, occasionally reminding viewers that the Nazi leadership plans to transfer Rudolf away from the home that he and Hedwig built. Instead, scenes unfold as a series of stand-alone vignettes with no real arc or urgency, reducing the characters’ lives into museum pieces—an implication that becomes explicit in the final act. The characters have no interior life, and Glazer does not attempt to suggest they do. He shoots them often from below or in long tracking shots from the side, giving them a machine-like efficiency.
Unlike his previous film, Under the Skin, Glazer restricts the ostentatious visuals to a single recurring bit, switching to inverted black-and-white sequences whenever Höss reads a story to his daughter. At first, the sight of a little girl in film negative, crossing a field and gathering flowers, rocks, and other sundry items into her basket, seems like a glimmer of fantasy interrupting the story, a reminder that Höss is still a human with a gift for imagination like any of us. The film, however, rejects that premise when it reveals that the meaning behind the girl and her actions in the field have nothing to do with the Hösses. They lack the imagination for even such a simple sight.
As bland as Glazer makes the lives of the Höss family, he does not make them peaceful.
As bland as Glazer makes the lives of the Höss family, he does not make them peaceful. He lowers the dialogue to the middle of the soundtrack, pushing into the mix indistinct screams, barking dogs, and gunshots (an effect somewhat dampened for English speakers, who are watching the German-language movie with subtitles). Save for a single shot of Höss immersed in smoke, we never see inside the camp. Nevertheless, it remains ever-present, the source of all the privileges the Hösses enjoy inside their home and in the Reich.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” during her coverage of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker. As she observes in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Eichmann struck her neither as a hateful monster nor as an evil genius. He didn’t even seem to be an antisemite. Rather, Eichmann simply followed the rules.
“[W]hatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen,” Arendt writes of Eichmann. “He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.”
Adolf Eichmann only receives a passing reference in The Zone of Interest, but the Hösses embrace his ideology. Glazer certainly includes images of Höss following orders, particularly when he’s reassigned from Auschwitz. But the more telling moment occurs when Hedwig learns about his reassignment. Instead of simply accepting her husband’s commanding officer’s decree, she demands that he fight back and take his complaint all the way to Hitler himself. On what grounds? Because, she says, the family has earned their home, by virtue of Rudolf’s service to the Reich and Hedwig’s dedication to domesticity.
Hedwig’s anger reveals a faith in the rule of law that supersedes orders, a commitment to a series of agreements (implied or explicit) that they’ve followed to the point that they deserve certain rewards. Hedwig and Rudolf see their life as an extension of their legal right. They deserve their home and their status, and will let no one—neither the Jews they exterminate on the other side of the wall nor the highest ranking members of the Nazi Party—take away that right. After all, that right gives them their quiet existence.