I just finished watching The Zone of Interest. It made my skin crawl by the end. I saw the trailer for the film a few months ago, and because I love A24 films (this one is from A24) I wanted to see it. It also won for Best International Feature and Best Sound at the Academy Awards and so I thought, Wow, this must have been a really powerful film. And it was. I have not read the book by Martin Amis but after watching this movie I want to.
I streamed the film on my laptop, and the first three minutes of the film, I didn’t know if my screen was black on purpose or if there was a technical glitch but then I realized it was on purpose. The film opens with very ominous somber music, and I guess it was to prepare me for the disturbing horrors that I was going to sit through and watch for the next hour and a half. Honestly, I can see why this movie won for Best Sound at the Academy Awards. It’s not like other films I have seen. Most of the films I watch have big loud scores or lots of soundtrack music and are also heavy on dialogue. I got pretty distracted at the beginning, to be honest, but I think when I could sit with the silence throughout this movie, I was able to appreciate the unique way it was filmed. It required patience because there wasn’t a lot going on at first, but as the film gradually went on, my blood started to curdle as it became more evident that this was not going to be a comfortable film to watch. Because the film is focused on the Hoss family’s life and them going about the day-to-day, it was easy for me to forget that these people didn’t actually live normal lives. The seemingly calm blissful shots of Hedwig tending to her garden or her children playing in the pool are unsettling, because against the backdrop of these fun and games is the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The film does not show the Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz being killed or gassed on-screen; however, the atrocities and the genocide of these prisoners is very much on-screen in a way. They just show the atrocities through sound. You may not see the atrocities, but you can hear the screaming, the beatings and the other atrocities that the Nazis put the Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz through. Even in the seemingly quiet moments, it feels disturbing when you consider the overall theme (aka that this family is raising their kids right next to a concentration camp.) The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is always in the background, and I think that is gave me goosebumps throughout the film. The coldness and apathy with which the Hoss family regards the genocide of the people in Auschwitz haunted me. The film does show Rudolf, who is this Nazi officer, as an everyday human being who, like a lot of people, had a wife and kids who he loved, but also, the film shows that at the end of the day, he and the other Nazis were still responsible for the horrors they committed at Auschwitz, and no amount of seeing him put his kids to bed or eating dinner with his family was going to take away this disturbing fact.
It was also interesting because in many of the films I have watched about the Holocaust, they focus on the men who perpetrated these crimes. However, Hedwig is just as accountable for these atrocities as her husband. In one scene, she is telling her mother that people are now calling her the “queen of Auschwitz.” It reminded me of the film 12 Years a Slave, because Master Epps’s wife inflicted cruelty on the slaves and especially an enslaved woman named Patsy. Epps frequently rapes Patsy, and Mistress Epps frequently makes Patsy a target of her violence. While studying about U.S. slavery, it seemed that the perpetrators of this cruelty were all men, but after watching 12 Years a Slave it showed me that the wives of these slaveowners were just as bad as their husbands in inflicting cruelty on the slaves. In The Zone of Interest, Hedwig finds out that her husband has to move to Germany because he has been promoted to deputy inspector of the concentration camps, and she tells him she can’t move the family because they have such a comfortable life there. Honestly, it was disturbing that this woman wanted to still let her kids live next to a place where fellow humans being were being murdered. Jewish people aren’t the main characters in the film, but they appear whenever they are bringing things to the house and Hedwig and her family act like these people don’t exist. There is one scene that I won’t forget, and it’s when one of the prisoners at Auschwitz brings a bag of clothes that the Jewish people in Auschwitz once wore. Hedwig tries on a fur coat that belonged to a Jewish woman, and she is looking in the mirror at herself and then she finds lipstick in the woman’s coat and tries it on. It seems so banal, so ordinary, seeing this woman trying on clothing, until I remembered that this coat once belonged to another human being who, unlike Hedwig, didn’t get to live and enjoy her life because she was murdered in Auschwitz. The movie showed the horrors of the Holocaust through silence and a lack of dialogue. I watched The Pianist a couple of years ago, and it shows onscreen the violence that the Nazis committed against the Jewish people. The Zone of Interest showed the violence of the Holocaust, but in a different way. I saw silent shots of Auschwitz in the background, while Hedwig and Rudolf act like it’s perfectly normal to live next to a site where people were being gassed and tortured in the cruelest ways. But as the viewer, I know that it’s not normal. In fact, it’s horrific. This film showed me that silence in the case of human rights abuses only perpetuates more violence. It was also disturbing to know that their kids grew up thinking this kind of life was normal (later on, one of the children joins the Hitler Youth.) Children’s brains aren’t fully formed, and so they grow up believing this propaganda and misinformation is the truth. The adults indoctrinate them and in the long run, dehumanize and desensitize these children to this violence, and throughout the film Hedwig and Rudolf go to great lengths to shield their children from these horrors that are happening behind-the-scenes. In one scene, Rudolf goes swimming with his kids, and they are playing in the water, but then Rudolf finds the human remains and ash (I’m guessing they are remains of prisoners at Auschwitz) in the water, and he tells his kids to get out. The women who work for Hedwig and Rudolf have to wash the kids’ bodies of this ash, showing how they didn’t want the kids to learn about the horrors that were happening right next door to them while they continued to play and enjoy their childhood. Over the fence, right next door, there were children in Auschwitz who once lived normal happy lives like Hedwig’s kids but unlike Hedwig’s kids, they never got another chance to experience their childhood because of the horrors they went through in Auschwitz.
I think that is why Jojo Rabbit’s message was hopeful because Jojo overcame his ignorance when he actually got to know Elsa, and he learned that his ideas about Jewish people were misguided. When he saw Elsa’s humanity, he realized he didn’t need to follow Hitler anymore. However, as much as I loved watching Jojo Rabbit, I had to understand that it was a fictional movie that intended to incorporate humor even with its serious subject matter (Taika Waititi plays a cartoonish version of Adolf Hitler), and that a film like The Zone of Interest wasn’t meant to be charming or funny. The Zone of Interest showed the coldness and apathy with which people treated the Holocaust, and there was no happy ending, as the final shot of the film showed. However, there was a moment of hope later on in the film. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but there are several shots of a Polish girl leaving food at the work sites of the Jewish prisoners, which is the rare moment in the film that shows that there were people who cared and wanted to help the prisoners. I remember the director, Jonathan Glazer, mentioned this woman in his acceptance speech, but I didn’t know much about her until I looked her up. The Polish girl was inspired by a real woman who left apples for the prisoners at Auschwitz (this Wikipedia article talks more about her story.) They used a different camera to shoot these scenes with the girl so that it looked like she was glowing in the dark during the film, and during his speech, Glazer mentioned the woman who inspired the girl in the film, Aleksandra Bystron-Kolodziejczyk, “glows in the film as she did in real life.” I think shooting the scenes with girl with a thermographic camera gave her an angelic quality to kind of show that her scenes were the rare moments of humanity and hope in an otherwise matter-of-fact bleak movie about how people dehumanize other people.
And this film reminded me why education about genocide, slavery and other human rights abuses is so important, and that is why during the last scene, which takes place at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, my skin crawled with goosebumps. They didn’t even have to say anything at the end for me to know what this film was trying to communicate to me. It communicated to me that we need to study history and have these museums so that people like me can be aware and learn about these horrific crimes, because history repeats itself far too often. My blood ran cold when Rudolf and the other Nazi officers are talking about their plans to build gas chambers and crematoriums, and the cold distance with which they talk about these horrors is beyond horrific. They treat it like it’s their normal everyday job to commit mass genocide. It reminded me of when I watched Killers of the Flower Moon. As someone with only a textbook understanding about Indigenous history, watching the film was chilling and dark in how it showed the cold and calculating nature with which these white people carried out the mass murders of the Osage people. There is a scene in which Ernest tells his uncle, William “Bill” Hale, that he is going to testify against him, and Hale tells him that people are going to forget about the Osage murders and in another scene, he referred to what he was doing to the Osage people as a “death business.” The word “business” sounds transactional, and it reminded me of the dehumanization and desensitization that went into committing these murders. Ernest kept telling Mollie he loved her and that he wanted to be with her and their kids, but he poisoned her and also killed her family members, so it was no surprise that she had to get away from him, no matter how much he wanted to stay married to her. I didn’t know much about the Osage murders before watching the movie, but seeing onscreen the brutal ways these white men carried out the murders made my stomach churn, and it also made me angry, sad and deeply pained. At the end of The Zone of Interest, seeing the display windows with the mass piles of shoes and other remains of the Jewish prisoners chilled my blood and reminded me that studying history in the present is of the utmost importance because forgetting the past only perpetuates this kind of inhumane violence.
The Zone of Interest. 2023. 1 hour and 45 min. Directed by Jonathan Glazer. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking.
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