Title: The Zone of Interest
Rating: 5 Stars
I know that I’m late to this film. This is now the ninth film that I’ve seen of the ten films nominated for 2024 Best Picture by the Academy. The only one that I haven’t seen yet is Past Lives. I don’t know, it just seems like a pretty basic missed connection love story kind of film. I may or may not get around to watching it.
However, I loved the The Zone of Interest. It’s an interesting conundrum for a filmmaker. How do you film a historical event that is unspeakably, unimaginably evil? Specifically, how do you depict the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration / death camp? How do you depict Rudolph Höss, the commandant there for three and a half years. Caught and hanged after the war, when told that he was responsible for three and a half million victims, he replied that he was only responsible for two and a half million, the other million simply starved or died from disease (clearly not his fault, right?).
Some filmmakers try to picture the reality of this madness. Think of Schindler’s List and Ralph Fiennes’ chilling portrayal of commandant Amon Göth. Some go for overkill of the details. Think of Shoah, a nine hour documentary interviewing Germans that had varying levels of involvement in the mass deaths.
The Zone of Interest makes a different choice. The interior of the camp itself is never shown. You never see any deaths. Instead, the film focuses on the Höss family. Rudolph was married and had five children. They set up house directly outside the gates of the camp. The house is a large, immaculate, beautiful house full of laughing children. There is a very nice garden that shares a wall with the prison camp.
In this domestic bliss there is a constant stream of discordant noises in the background. There are the occasional gun shots. There are the barks of vicious guard dogs. There is the sound of trains. There are heavy mechanical noises. There are regular plumes of smoke. Sometimes there are flames shooting out of a furnace.
It seems as if this lovely family and their lovely home are obliviously placed right next to hell. Of course, that is precisely the situation. The head of the house, the loving father Rudolph, is the lead devil.
It’s clear that, when the film takes place, that the Höss family has lived there for some time. No one, not even the children, reacts to the sound of gunfire.
The willful ignorance of the suffering taking place just a few meters from their house is breathtaking. Their dinner tables, garden tables, and picnics are laden with more food than any of them can possibly eat. Their ever present dog sneaks uneaten food off of the table. Meanwhile, next door, victims are starving to death. Every night, a polish girl steals out at night to hide apples for the inmates to find.
There’s not a lot of backstory to the characters, but I’m guessing that the mother grew up poor. She has that look and attitude of someone that has climbed to a height never contemplated. This has made her cruel. She’s harsh to the servants, off handedly threatening one by telling her that with one word her husband can burn her to dust. She makes offhand jokes about the Jews living next door. Her mother comes to visit. Initially impressed by the house, once she actually understands the horror of what’s going on next door, she abruptly leaves.
The Nazis go to great lengths to pretend that evil is not taking place. In one scene, several German industrialists meet with Höss to discuss a new method of cremation. They carefully use terms like how the product moves through their system and the expected increase in yield. If you did not know differently, you wouldn’t guess that they are talking about mass incineration of executed prisoners.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil. She was talking about Adolph Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Final Solution. She found him not to be evil incarnate but a bland, bloodless bureaucrat ambitiously moving up the Nazi hierarchy. Since designing mass murder was what an ambitious Nazi bureaucrat had to do, he did it.
Is this what the film is touching on here? Höss and his wife are up and comers. Although the film doesn’t go into it, Höss was a pretty early member of the Nazi Party. He clearly saw the Nazi Party as the ticket to fulfil his ambition. Perhaps, if the Nazi Party didn’t exist, might he have ended up a middle manager of a factory somewhere?
People say, when doing something that they know is not right, that you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet. In the case of Rudolph Höss, he had to break three and a half million eggs (give or take a million).
This film was a disturbing picture of what the banality of evil really looks like.
dorkenstein 