On the Genocide of the Street

The Zone of Interest is a high-class bummer. Is it more than that?

[Oscar nominations are out and I’m ahead of schedule with reviews of top contenders like Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Poor Things, Past Lives, American Fiction, Oppenheimer, and Maestro. Here’s another — much more to come! ]  

The two Jonathan Glazer movies I saw before The Zone of Interest were sufficiently unsettling that I really, really wasn’t looking forward to seeing his technique applied to a story about Rudolph Höss, his wife and kids, and the nice house they live in just outside the Auschwitz concentration camp, of which he is commandant during the Third Reich.

Sexy Beast is a Brit caper picture in which the baroque viciousness of spivs serves as the externalized existential dread of a retired English gangster, in such bravura fashion that it makes the main character played by Ray Winstone look like a recessive, fearful victim — appropriately so, but I wonder what guys who thought they were getting a Guy Ritchie movie must have thought. Under The Skin may be the best movie of the century so far, but it’s rough going, not just because its rendering of the methods used by aliens to capture and (for purposes never made clear) consume human bodies is even creepier than a more literal version would have been, but also because of what the movie suggests about humanity and mercy. The last shot of Scarlett Johansson will haunt me to my grave.

So I figured Glazer would give us more a vision than a story, and while that seems a more effective way to treat the subject than a good old-fashioned Cowboys-and-Nazis potboiler, I expected it to be a very unpleasant experience that I would be left to analyze and accommodate for myself, like a tour of a Holocaust museum. As it turned out I was on the right track.

There’s plenty of obvious visionary stuff in The Zone of Interest, but there are also many fairly straightforward scenes of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, their family, servants, and associates — though, now that I think of it, realistic as they are they’re not really so straightforward as that. (The extraordinary cinematography by Lukasz Zal sometimes catches angles and slants of light that suddenly remind us how strange this all is. Oh, and so far as I could tell there are absolutely no close-ups, which is jarring and weirdly dispiriting.)

For example, we start with the Hösses having a nice sunlit picnic by a pretty river, swimming and laughing. They chat drowsily as they drive home at night down an absolutely unlit path — we see only what little of the dirt road the headlamps illuminate, giving the effect of a tunnel (a recurring visual motif in the film). We see the Höss’ house from outside as the lights are being shut off, and hear for the first time, as if from a distance, a low thrum like an old steam turbine or a simmering volcano, and buried within it what sound like human voices in distress. It is noticeable but you can imagine how it might become, like floaters in your eye or city traffic, something one doesn’t notice. Over the course of the movie, though, it gets louder and more distinct.

There are scenes of the family enjoying their home, Hedwig especially, as she has designed and enthusiastically tends the little estate with its extensive gardens, trellises, and swimming pool. The house itself is less grand than you might expect — it looks bigger than it is, Hedwig explains — but tastefully appointed, well-run, gemütlich.  “Rudolf calls me the Queen of Auschwitz,” she proudly tells her mother Linna when she comes to visit. Linna is pleased for her daughter but, unlike her, notices the camp. “Maybe Esther Silberman is over there,” Linna says. Which one was she, Hedwig asks. “The one I used to clean for,” Linna says.

I wasn’t exactly relaxing into the picture when this happened but like a lot of other such moments it caught me out. It’s not as if you exactly forget these are Nazis. Though the Hösses have problems familiar to any career-minded family — overworked breadwinner, capricious bosses, the need to brown-nose — it’s clear enough that the adults know what’s up. They see things in the river that they don’t want the kids to know about. They cough up dark snot when the wind is unfavorable.

For me maybe the most chilling domestic scene (I guess you could say “spoiler”) is one in which Hedwig is outraged that Rudolph’s posting is being changed and they’ll have to move. He explains his superiors’ decision is final. “Then go to Hitler,” she cries. No, he says — “we have to leave.” “You have to leave,” she says. She and the kids can stay behind. I half expected her to suggest he telecommute. Like I said, we know they’re Nazis, but it’s extra disturbing whenever their cold-bloodedness is not specifically Nazi, but that of ordinary human beings we might know.

And this is not to speak of the more otherworldly bits, like what at first seems like a recurring dream of one of the children — a stunning reverse-image landscape in which a small girl gathers fruit and presses it into earthen walls — that leads to an entirely different perspective on life around Auschwitz; and what you might call the big reveal at the end, which I’m still puzzling out, though I can say it’s probably about the difficulty of understanding the enormity of the Holocaust when all of us are, in a manner of speaking, living with its effects.

Mica Levi’s music is suitably portentous and Johnnie Burns’ sound design slowly, cunningly achieves its impact. The actors’ contributions are harder to recognize than they might have been because the main characters are deprived of the star turns and privileged moments they’d get in a commercial movie, though as Hedwig Sandra Hüller really unlooses some depth charges; you can merely hate her, but then she’ll open up and you can see what a monster she really is — which didn’t increase my hatred so much as my despair. This is not, as you will have guessed, a movie propelled by narrative drive; it’s more of an object of contemplation. I admire the craft and the rigorous avoidance of cliché; it’s not Cowboys and Nazis, certainly and thank God. But I cannot guarantee it will reward your attention with something more than a very bad feeling.