In the Flesh: The Zone of Interest

Every frame of the first half of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest looks like a painting made by an alternate universe Norman Rockwell who served enthusiastically in the Hitler Youth. The lederhosen, the rosy-cheeked children, the careful color grading to emphasize the Höss family’s extreme whiteness, the gardens and trellises and scenes of stereotypical Aryan domesticity — it all points toward a towering and fearful sentimentality, the manufacturing on an almost unfathomable scale of a worldview predicated on intentional ignorance and inhumanity. The ghosts of their victims are everywhere. Faceless figures trudge in shackled lines behind screens of waving grass. Screams and gunshots linger in the air. As commandant’s wife Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) and her fellow officers’ wives paw through the confiscated clothes of murdered Jews, as her children inspect gold teeth pried from corpses by flashlight in their beds, the dead crowd close around each frame. Hüller is ghoulish in her role, but in a repulsively human and relatable way. It’s clear she thinks of the death camp from which her riches flow, that she feels some sort of guilt or dissonance,  but it emerges as rage and resentment, childlike stubbornness, a great need to hunker down behind her personal walls. As the film goes on she even begins to project whatever emotional slops churns darkly in her gut at her husband, Rudolf (Christian Friedel), becoming increasingly distant and cold toward him even as she covets the life his status affords her.

It’s difficult not to see the monolithic walls of Auschwitz, which form the backdrop to so many of these images of carefully constructed wholesomeness, as analogous to our current moment in history, to the genocide raging in Gaza and the willful cruelty and ignorance of so many Israeli settlers. To our own state of institutionalized and policed separation from the atrocities on which our way of life as Americans rests. We treat awareness of our sins as a far graver matter than the sins themselves, and cry out in horror when the innocent among us are exposed to this knowledge. Like Rudolf racing to pull his children out of a river choked with cremated human remains, we seek to cultivate ignorance, to grow it, to give it a chance to cover the world’s horrors as Hedwig hopes grapes will grow to cover her gazebo. “This is all my design,” she brags to her mother, Linna (Imogen Kogge). Linna is all pride and bluster in the moment, speculating gleefully as to whether a resented Jewish neighbor for whom she once cleaned house is imprisoned across the wall, but at night she stares in horror at the red glow of the crematoria, at the serpents of black smoke uncoiling fat and slow across the sky. When she flees, unable to cope with the sight of the camp, Hedwig burns her farewell letter. Even the idea of awareness of their crimes must be destroyed.

Our sole glimpse within the camps comes in the form of a protracted close-up on Rudolf in his SS uniform, white smoke swirling around him, as blood-curdling screams, gunshots, and the sounds of heavy machinery in action echo from all over. Rudolf is our window into Auschwitz because he is Auschwitz, ideally suited to the camp’s horrible ends by his mild temperament and immunity to guilt. Yet even he recognizes that to be touched by reminders of the camp’s existence is to be defiled. He leaps into action when ashes flood the river. He scrubs himself frantically to remove all traces of his victims from his skin. He has, if not an awareness of wrongdoing, an instinctual horror at the visible signs of it. He’ll use cremated remains to fertilize his wife’s garden, to grow the food that feeds his children, but the remove, the abstraction provided by distance, is psychologically crucial. Perhaps the film’s most haunting invocation of this phenomenon comes in its final sequence, in which a nauseated Rudolf retches repeatedly without managing to vomit and is interrupted briefly by a vision — perhaps his own, perhaps solely ours — of modern-day workers cleaning the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, itself full of these same ghostly signifiers of the dead. A mountain of empty shoes. Piles of abandoned luggage marked with the names of murdered owners. Have we succeeded in memorializing these crimes, in inoculating ourselves against their repetition, or have we only protected ourselves from them with the gossamer curtain of solemnity and national guilt?

Full of actor-improvised sequences captured by hidden cameras arranged throughout the household set, The Zone of Interest feels intensely personal and intimate. We track the Höss family’s day to day problems, Rudolf and Hedwig’s agita over Rudolf’s upcoming transfer to a supervisory position outside Auschwitz, the children at play and in conflict. In one particularly ghastly scene, eldest son Klaus (Johann Karthaus) locks his brother Hans-Jürgen (Luis Noah Witte) in the family’s greenhouse and then mimics the sound of gas rushing out of hidden vents as the younger boy screams in panicked anger. We watch as they become complicit in real time. The river’s ashes cling to them like a second skin, invisible and ever-present. Their father engages in the same horrible play, mentioning offhandedly to Hedwig that at a party in celebration of his achievements and the upcoming massive escalation of executions and slavery, all he could think about was the most efficient and effective ways to gas his guests. And so we sit, contemplating what living in Rudolf’s world has done to us, how our own complicity in a thousand nightmarish ongoing human crises will deform our souls, and how our descendants will build museums to convince themselves, solemnly, and with great depth of feeling, that they are innocent of our crimes, that they would choose differently than we did. If you want to see what that’s worth, open up a newspaper.