"The Zone of Interest" review: Horror in the unseen

“The Zone of Interest,” 2023, directed by Jonathan Glazer

★★★★★

It’s hard to know what to expect from "The Zone of Interest" when watching it for the first time. It’s a “Holocaust movie” – a loaded phrase that, in itself, implies undue dramatization, exploitation, and sterilization of a genocide. "Schindler's List", "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", and "Life is Beautiful" have all seen their fair share of criticism, and rightly so; there’s something insidious about using the real-life death of millions as a basis for entertainment. So when audiences first sit down to watch “The Zone of Interest”, they may be appropriately skeptical. "The Zone of Interest", however, isn’t designed to entertain. It feels bad to watch. There’s not even a traditional narrative structure – just a series of vignettes, seen from afar, obscuring and implying the most ghastly crimes behind a large, cement wall. The wall divides the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from the home of its commandant Rudolph Höss and his family as they simultaneously bask in their domestic bliss and commit some of the most heinous crimes humanity has ever seen. It’s a harrowing, disquieting viewing experience, in large part because of the way the film looks; it’s muted in color and is shot full-frame with large sensor digital cameras, making the violence feel alarmingly close despite the camera’s distance from its subjects. It’s this visual approach that sets The Zone of Interest apart from any film like it, and is an important element that makes it appropriately unkind to its audience. 

Part of what makes it upsetting, too, is not only the character’s attempted indifference towards the loss of life, but also that of the film itself. There is never any text on screen denoting the time or place of what’s being shown, and nothing even pointedly implies the family’s role in the Holocaust until well into the runtime, when Rudolph meets with his subordinates to approve a crematorium. Director Jonathan Glazer understands, though, that the viewer understands. We know what a red armband denotes, we know what’s being burned that creates the clouds of ash in the background, and Glazer’s point comes across: we’re not paying attention, and we should be. This intentionality makes the reasoning to shoot on high definition digital cameras clear as well, indicting the audience for our compartmentalization of the detached images on the news that the film’s frames parallel.

It’s the color (or lack thereof) in the scenes that make them intentionally unpleasant as well. Seemingly every element is drained of its color – even the meticulously-tended-to flower garden that lines the edges of the property feels infected with a terrible grayness. This isn’t to say Glazer and director of photography Łukasz Żal disregard the medium they’re working with. The framing, staging, and blocking of each scene is clearly meticulous and deliberate; the lens never shies away from the falling ash or the bones that float down the river from the death camp, making the death an omnipresent burden for the audience to bear. The life the Höss family lives is painfully, horrifically mundane, and the film’s cinematography reflects that. This ugly, nauseous photography is perhaps the only way to communicate these ideas.

The pedestrian evil comes across in Glazer’s unorthodox shot selection, too. The film was shot on a collection of concealed cameras around the home, with no crew on set, trapping the actors in their roles for sometimes over an hour at a time. The result is an anesthetized, surveillance-style nightmare that, combined with high framerates, feels jarringly immediate. Characters are almost never shown in anything closer than a medium, but their passive maliciousness is all too real.

"The Zone of Interest" is the rare case of a film that should look “bad”, and the frank cheerlessness of its imagery feels needed in a climate that turned the story of the atomic bomb that killed hundreds of thousands into a bombastic summer blockbuster and allowed the systematic killing of the Osage tribe to morph into a shiny, marketable streaming release. Film as a medium has a responsibility to confront these atrocities, and "Oppenheimer" and "Killers of the Flower Moon" do so, and well, in many ways, but Glazer’s approach feels far less likely to be misconstrued, especially while American tax dollars fund a genocide in the Middle East.