I’ll never forget the first time I saw Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar winning film, The Zone of Interest. I was visiting a friend in Sheffield – the weather was obviously bad so we decided to go to the cinema and watch the new Holocaust movie – how very cheerful of us…
Obviously spending a couple hours watching people suffer through one of the most horrific atrocities in history is not everyone’s idea of a fun outing, but there’s a reason so many are compelled to keep revisiting this dark period. As the famous quote goes: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
As I left the cinema, I remember feeling very overwhelmed by what I’d seen. This film managed to conjure up these deep guttural feelings of dread, despair and reflection in me that seemed strange, considering what I had just seen was basically 105 minutes of a family going about their daily lives in their dream home.
The Zone of Interest follows the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family who live directly next to the infamous concentration camp.
What makes The Zone of Interest such a powerful piece of art is not a compelling narrative or interesting characters. Instead, this film excels at creating a chilling, unflinching and complex depiction of evil, without ever showing a second of violence.
While I believe The Zone of Interest to be a modern masterpiece, I know many who found it to be boring and uneventful, and I completely understand that criticism. After all, the film literally only ever shows the normal day-to-day happenings of a German family who just happened to live next to a place where daily murder and unspeakable suffering were the norm. But if you fully engage with this film, there is no denying its effect.
There has long been an argument that the horrors of the Holocaust can never truly be realized on screen, plainly because those events were too distressing and bleak to even comprehend, let alone portray in a Hollywood movie. Director Jonathan Glazer avoids this discourse by focusing his film on the perpetrators rather than the victims. We are never shown over the wall into the concentration camp. Instead, we are shown glimpses – plumes of smoke rising into the air, a man wearing striped clothing cleaning the blood off the commandant’s shoes, and a train arriving at the station. We know what is going on without ever being overtly shown.
Where the Zone of Interest authentically brings attention to those horrors is in its sound design. Throughout the film, sound is a key aspect in telling the story of the Holocaust. The filmmakers have gone on record to illustrate how this film was designed as two. One you see and one you hear. The one you see is a fairly straightforward family drama, whereas the sound of the concentration camp paints an entirely different, more disturbing picture. The family acts blissfully unaware, oblivious to the suffering happening feet away from their home. Constant sounds of death and despair have become mundane to these people.
The incredible use of sound is only further reinforced through Mica Levi’s stunning, but sparse, cinematic score. The film opens with a 3-minute black screen accompanied by a haunting piece of music that lets the audience know what is important in their viewing experience. Their imagination and their ears. This film is all about what is not seen. We as the audience are asked to fully engage with what we’re seeing and hearing. What we are seeing is a standard documentary-esque focus on one family’s activities. Yet the sound and score of the film tell us the real story.
It is this disconnect between the normal actions of the family and the despicable acts of genocide that happen over the wall that hits home. The Zone of Interest forces the viewer to consider their own situation in comparison to the family that lives next to Auschwitz. How would you act in their position?
Most importantly it made me think about how we all can become oblivious to the suffering of others. Just think about all the conflict and suffering going on in the world currently. How many of us actively go about trying to end that suffering? How many of us don’t confront the harsh truths by facing them head-on, instead pushing them to the background, letting them blend in with everything else.
It’s this powerful message that The Zone of Interest communicates without sensationalizing the suffering of the victims that makes it a masterpiece of modern cinema.
