The Zone of Interest is a film set in the house that’s right next door to Auschwitz, so it has a mountain to climb. Which is this – against the brute fact of exterminating people en masse, pictorial representation of the same is always going to look a bit kitsch.
Jonathan Glazer, who directs and reworks Martin Amis’s novel, aims to get round the problem by simply not showing the grim goings-on next door. Instead he focuses exclusively on the life that camp commandant Rudolf Höss (not to be confused with Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess) lived with his wife, Hedwig, and children.
What a picture Glazer paints, of life in this prim, neat, tidy house hard up against the camp’s perimeter wall. The family goes out on little swimming trips to the river, the children are read fairy tales at night, visitors come by for coffee, cake and gossip, and Hedwig tends the garden, of which she is very proud.
No one ever mentions what’s going on only metres away, though they cannot fail to know. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) regularly takes delivery of clothing that once belonged to dead people and mocks a friend who thought a new coat came from Canada the country, not Kanada the Auschwitz warehouse. One of the children plays with gold teeth. Another stops while out horseriding with his brother by the river – “Listen,” he says, “it’s a Eurasian bittern”. It is indeed, behind the sound of gunshots and the relentlesss grinding sound that never lets up. At night, visible from the house, the smoke spewing from the crematoria chimneys glows red.
The idea of the banality of evil is itself now a banality, and another hill for Glazer to climb. He shot his film without a crew on set, using multiple, strategically hidden cameras in the house and garden, discombobulating the actors – they never knew which camera they were on – but dragging from them the most naturalistic performances, whether they are the stars, the reliably superb Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller as Höss and his wife, or the actors who play the children, or the two/three actors scurrying around in the house and garden, as Jews are keeping their heads down, mindful of where they might end up if they cause any displeasure to the lady of the house.
There is no prettification, or antiquifying going on. Glazer shot on digital and that’s the image you get – as sharp and clean as the Hösses’ house, which is a mix of the orderly, the tasteful, the practical and the modern.
Glazer has described Johnnie Burn’s sound design as the “other film… arguably the film”. It tells in sound the story that Glazer’s pictures won’t show us via a collection of animal howls, irregular gunfire bursts and nightmarish mechanical grating. Along with Mica Levi’s score (much of which was discarded to keep the mood austere), it is the counterfactual to the story being told by the endless display of provincial normality.
What’s the drama? Very little, again an irony. At one point Hedwig beseeches her husband to take her again to Italy, to that lovely spa where they met all those lovely people the last time they went. At another, hearing that he’s about to be re-assigned to a different camp, we get the only real flare-up of the film – Hedwig goes into battle against her husband. All that hard work on the garden cannot be wasted, she argues, and why should it, have a word with Hitler (if you’re any sort of man, is the unspoken idea).
Glazer has told his story in the first 20 minutes but one thing keeps us watching. To work out what sort of people these are. Glazer lifts the veil only once, separately, on Hedwig and Rudolf, and we get a glimpse of the flinty souls of this couple. And while they’re clearly a touch chillier than most, they’re not that unusual. These are not monsters, these monsters, they are normal people, adaptable to any situation. Look how well they are doing next door to Auschwitz – in the home we always wanted, says Hedwig, living the life we always wanted for our family.
The Zone of Interest – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
