Directed Jonathan Glazer. Starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller. 2023.
In 1943, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife, Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house right next to the concentration and extermination camp he helped create.
The walls of the garden to the Höss house, where children play and adults garden so pleasantly, immediately backs on to Auschwitz and the horrors it holds. Throughout the film we are shown very little of the actual camp, but within the paradise the family has built in this house, we hear horrors from afar. The screams of the dying, the smell of the smoke, the glow of the flames, all lingering over everything we see.
In the lead role, Friedel plays the infamous commandant of Auschwitz, Höss, as a efficient middle-manager, with a thin, needling voice, who has had a rapid rise up the Nazi party and is trying to maintain his position. Every room he enters, he fantasises about the most cost and speed effective way he could slaughter them all. He is a caring parent but has no comprehension of the worth of life. A monster wrapped up in a tiny man, filing papers.
Sandra Hüller, who also stars this year in Anatomy of a Fall, gives a radically different performance in this film. Hedwig is a woman who cares greatly for her garden and the home she builds for her family, but has truly no care for human life outside of this. The horrors of the holocaust don’t concern her in the slightest, and her outbursts of panic and violence only come when she is inconvenienced personally. Hüller manages to make her both a true personification of evil, and also a complex central character.
Sound mixing and editing is often the most underappreciated and little understood parts of every film, but in The Zone of Interest, it is the heart of everything. The deafening, soul shaking noises that reverberate through the film, showing us the horror happening just off screen while the camera hangs on the paradise garden the family inhabit. It deserves awards.
Jonathan Glazer makes very few films, but when he does make one, it is truly the most unique and thought provoking of any given year. There is not a commercial bone in his body, he is purely focused on the story he wants to tell and the emotion he wants to leave the audience feeling,
Staring down into the darkness, the very depths of hell represented in the mundanity of a building staircase, Höss seems to almost see the horror his life has brought, and then slowly continue his descent all the same. The most bone-chilling evil resonates through every shot here, and Glazer has produced not just a reflection of the past, but a warning for the future.
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