The Zone of Interest – a review

I family day at the home of Herr Rudolph Höss, Auschwitz over the wall

This film is minimalism whittled down to the bare bone. Nothing much happens, but by the way the script and images are constructed, by the behaviour of the participants, it activates your imagination to think about and see what is not there on the screen, not shown, but actually is there, because you saw or heard it. As such, it is unique in the output of films. Western films, as opposed to Eastern, the latter a culture than prefers the inner life, giving chracters dignity.

Let’s begin with the not so obvious, writer-director Jonathan Glazer junks almost all of Martin Amis’ book on which the film is shakily based, characters, dialogue and plot. That is something of a record as far as adaptations go, and a sure fire insult to the late Amis’ reputation. I doubt it will attract a large audience; brave of C4 Films to back it. What rescues the rudiments of the book? The subjectivity in our minds. The film’s plot is uneventful, yet holds great meaning. Clever and intellectually insightful, it is based on a book, some credit must go to the book’s author, Martin Amis.

In 2014, the director Jonathan Glazer read Amis’s then published The Zone of Interest, which told a fictionalised account of a camp commandant and his family. (The term ‘zone of interest’ was used by Nazis to describe the 40-square kilometres surrounding Auschwitz in German-annexed Poland.) Glazer says “Amis had done it in a way I hadn’t come across, and it became the kernel of my interpretation.” Glazer began by making the first of many trips to Auschwitz and researching the archives, realising Amis had actually based the book on the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who lived on site. “It became more and more fascinating how grotesquely familiar these people were, so I veered towards the history of it.”

The scarsity of action, high drama or crisis would down any other film. Most films hope to stimulate the imagination, whisk you to another world: the silent old man on the child’s swing told minutes earlier he has terminal cancer, we imagine what he must be feeling. Robert the Bruce beaten, going all surly and moody has us wonder if he is summing up resolve as he watches a spider mend is broken web, the wife emotional, distraught, head in hands, on learning of her husband’s infidelity – we need hear no words. We know what they are thinking. But Zone is of a different intensity. In my youth this film would be categorised as ‘highbrow’.

For the first few minutes I was sure it was going to be like Gymnopedie, the composition of Erik Satie, what you hear is all there is, there is nothing behind the soulful melody. Zone is a whole warehouse, or should I say, concentration camp, of meaning. And it was filmed for fifty-five days outside Auschwitz.

I will give one example of how subtle is this film. Höss’ wife Hedwig’s has her mother to stay. She is shown the garden, the vegetables, the flowers, the small paddling pool. “You did all this?” she asks. “Yes, I did,” answers her daughter, but I had help.” This is as close as we get to learn a single name of a servant. Watch the mother closely, she is aware of the camp over the high wall. She says nothing, shows nothing on her face. Is she troubled? Later we see her looking out of her bedroom window at the camp’s incineration chimney, the flames and smoke reaching up into the night sky.

Sometime later we discover the mother has left the cold, austerely designed home without warning. She leaves a written note. The wife, irony of ironies, reads it, (we imagine it says something along the lines of “This place is a hell I cannot stay here,” and then puts the one page letter in the kitchen stove’s fire and shuts the metal door so that no one sees what was written on it, and carries on eating her lunch. Emotionalism will not disrupt her methodical existence or plans for a holiday.

Christian Friedel playing the commandant, a heavy smoker with a footballer’s hairstyle

The story concerns itself almost solely with the humdrum domestic life of a convinced Nazi, Herr Rudolph Höss, played Christian Friedel with suitably shaved hair in today’s fashion, his wife Hedwig, (played by Sandra Hüller) their children, his mother-in-law and their servants. Breakfast time, time in the walled garden, reading stories to the children, feeding the dog, bath time and bed time, everything, in fact, except toilet time. Even a kiss on the cheek is rote offered, the Sieg Heil obligatory.

To break the domestic monotony, a few scenes given over to his meetings with other German officers to agree upon a way to accommodate and new intake of doomed souls. 700,000 are to be brought to Auschwitz in cattle trains – the Final Solution – the meeting called to discuss how to dispatch them expeditiously, efficiently, “keep twenty-five percent for work”. Höss is admired. He is able to get rid of more Jews, Romanian gypsies and mentally ill Germans, faster than other extermination camps. And it is run like clockwork. We never see Holocaust victims, but in moments we hear their screams and the shouts of guards followed by rifle fire. What chills is the constant low rumble of the ovens. The noise bores into our brain.

Höss is a man who is all surface, ready to oblige senior Nazis, happy to undertake his mission, respect for his work and promotion the reward. His wife is just as ruthless. She shows her mother how she will drape the barbed wire atop the camp wall with trailing plants and roses. She talks to her husband of her wish to re peat a past holiday in the German countryside, a scene shown at the start of the film. But her husband is introspective. The day’s work in the camp is stressful, keeping under-staff in line, supervising train arrivals and how those disembarking should be broken into groups, old and infirm, healthy males for work, women, and then there’s the book keeping, and keeping Hitler’s offices informed of Jew numbers ‘removed’, the attendant costs and any camp problems.

Jonathan Glazer (left) and cinematographer Lukasz Zal filming Zone

The film’s presentation of all I describe is so matter-of-fact that we are frozen in our seats, mouth open fascinated to wee where it will all go, soap of the highest standard. Can people be that hideously callous, able to block out what they see and what they cause to happen, the suffering of so many innocents?

Höss turns out to be such a good Nazi that he wins the corporate battle he’s fighting. Told he is moving to another camp, he gets to return to his job as head of Auschwitz because his replacement wasn’t deemed up to the task. Does nothing of what he does affect him? Well, yes, but again we are given a glimpse at a distance. As he leaves one meeting in the Nazi headquarters he stop on the staircase and wretches. Overcome by nausea, has he foreseen the consequence of his actions?

Jonathan Glazer has had a varied film career so far. In 2000, he came to our attention with Sexy Beast (a hellova lot of crooked Cockney geezers) often shown on television, and the Glasgow based “Under the Skin” (2013), a sci-fi parable starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien predator that had me half-admiring and half-disappointed. The plot was confused and pretentious.

I saw Zone in the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh. It had been transferred from one of the small screens to the large auditorium. It was filmed in muted tones, on low grade cameras, (mostly as if pointing at actors under a proscenium arch) no doubt to give it the degraded air of an old 1930’s drama. However, the cinema’s projector was not strong enough to light scenes properly, making a day in the garden look a day in a Scottish dreich Sunday, the house gloomy.

When I left the cinema did I feel sympathy for Israel’s war against the Palestinians? No, Benjamin Netanyahu thinks God told him to use genocide as a weapon against the Palestinians. Moreover, Zone is not as memorable as the outstanding Son of Saul, a drama acted out inside the claustrophobic recreation of a concentration camp.

Glazer has made an adaptation of Amis’s novel into a stylistic visual and aural masterwork of technique, the work of a Jewish visual artist depicting the reverse side of the Holocaust. The film is an experiment that works perfectly in its context, but as a technique, something one might apply to other subject matter, it has nowhere to go. Nevertheless, what the film shows us is the banality of evil. Five stars. 

• Star rating: Five
• Director: Jonathan Glazer
• Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Medusa Knopf, Daniel Holzberg,
• Writer: Jonathan Glazer
• Cinematographer: Lukasz Żal.
• Composer: Mica Levi
• Adult Rating: PG 13
• Duration: 1 hour 43 minutes
• RATING CRITERIA
• 5 plus: potential classic, innovative. 5: outstanding. 4: excellent. 3.5: excellent but flawed. 3: good if formulaic. 2: straight to DVD. 1: crap; why did they bother?