Immoral Apathy: The Disturbing Truth in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest

5/5

*Warning* In this essay, I must discuss the tragedy of the Holocaust as it is a central aspect of The Zone of Interest. If hearing me discuss this devastating period of our history would at all be triggering to you, you are more than welcome to not read this post. 

It is not a leap for me to say that 2023 was a great year for films. It was the first year since the pandemic when things finally felt (mostly) normal. Movies were a major part of our popular culture once more (thanks Greta and Chris), and we saw a mass exodus of films by great filmmakers make their way to our screens. Now, it was not a flawless year for the industry; strikes halted productions (rightfully so) and small theaters still struggle to find success between the releases of major blockbusters. However, all in all, this year was an utter success from my perspective. I can easily list more than a dozen films from 2023 that entertained or enthralled me (or sometimes both). Out of these films that left an impression on me, one, in particular, stood out for its artistic boldness and groundbreaking examination of a familiar subject matter, however, following its "wider" theatrical release in the States, it seems not enough people are talking about it and even fewer have actually seen it. Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece The Zone of Interest, an adaptation of a novel by the same name, focuses on a German family in a beautiful, idyllic home that, just so happens, to be directly outside the Auschwitz concentration camp. The patriarch of the family, Rudolf Höss, is the commandant of the camp, and the film primarily centers around him, his wife, Hedwig, and their children. While its initial elevator pitch doesn’t do a lot to distinguish itself from other Holocaust/WWII dramas, the masterful Direction of Glazer and the film’s core thematic explorations elevate The Zone of Interest to heights that exceed anyone's wildest expectations and push the medium forward in thrilling new ways.

My familiarity with Jonathan Glazer’s work before this exceptional achievement was, to put it bluntly, nonexistent. The British filmmaker directed 3 feature films prior to The Zone of Interest (most notably 2013’s Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson) and also worked on over a dozen music videos, shorts, and commercial videos in his career spanning almost 3 decades. Even with this filmography, I somehow avoided his work until this past Summer and Fall when I began hearing rumblings of an exhilarating new arthouse picture making the festival rounds. Having been sufficiently intrigued by my favorite film journalists and a Grand Prix win at Cannes, I made seeing it one of my top priorities at the 2023 SCAD Film Festival. I was so intrigued by this film that I even skipped a chance to meet a legend, Bob Odenkirk, in order to make the screening. After sitting through the film for 106 minutes, I left the theater enamored with the bold artistry on display while lost in deep reflection on the meaning of the text (I will elaborate more on this later in a moment). Glazer and his team made many stylistic decisions in The Zone of Interest that are extremely unique in our modern landscape, however, they always felt justified and never forced for the sake of creating some form of shallow “high art”. 

The first and most obvious visual decision here is the shot design. Glazer and his cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, decided to primarily use static wide shots throughout the film. This decision, to keep the audience at a distance from the family, may feel jarring or unnatural to modern audiences who are used to more intimate and kinetic styles of shot design, but from a narrative standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to keep us at a distance. The first thing this does for the experience of the film is it positions the audience squarely as an observer. The 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman achieved a similar effect when capturing its central protagonist to what we see here, and I would love to know what influence (if any) this great work had on Glazer. Intimate shots make audiences active participants in the story, but these picture-like frames in The Zone of Interest make it clear that we are peering into this world like one would through a window. Glazer is showing us this family and their actions while preventing us from developing too much empathy for these individuals we are meant to watch and criticize. 

The second effect this stylistic choice achieves is it keeps the Holocaust ever present without ever needing to show us the horrors we are all too familiar with. In films like Schindler’s List, we are shown the horrors of the Holocaust up close and personal to devastating effect (devastating here meaning in the emotional context and not in a film criticism one). There are many examples of movies that expressly depict the cruelty of this horrible genocide, and Glazer was very aware of this. Instead of adding to the myriad of traumatic scenes in film history, Glazer takes a drastically different approach to his rendering of this harrowing event that is subtler in its execution, yet ten times more effective than if he had depicted the horrors on screen. We never see the torture or extermination of the Jewish people in this film, but through the inclusion of an imposing cement wall, barbed wire fencing, and chimney producing thick black smoke in the background of the film's wide shots, the sickening villainy occurring just outside of our line of sight is everpresent in the movie. The sound design by Johnnie Burn and his team further enhances this idea of distant horror with subtle sound design that incorporates faint cries with the chirping of birds into an aural soundscape that is truly unsettling, yet brutally authentic,  in its mixing. Never seeing the Holocaust, but constantly feeling the suffering and pain just out of view effectively enhances the horrors of the genocide while indicting the family as this torment persists.

All of the inspired artistic decisions mentioned previously are effective in their own way, but they all come together, in the end, to strengthen the narrative core of the film as it attempts to examine some hard truths about humanity and evil.

The Zone of Interest, and Glazer by extension, seems interested in examining this idea of apathy and the hand it plays in villainy. Too many examples of this thematic throughline can be found throughout the film’s scenes, but one example comes to mind. In one scene early on in the film, the commandant’s wife, played by Sandra Hüller (who has produced two killer performances this year btw), has a pile of clothes delivered to the family's home. She begins going through the pile and preparing to distribute the items amongst the family. While doing this, she becomes enraptured by a stunning fur coat contained within the stack of clothing and begins to try it on in the privacy of her room. When checking how the coat looks on her, Hedwig finds jewelry contained in the pockets of the coat and notices that it is dirty and ripped in areas. At this moment, it becomes clear where the clothes have come from, but instead of responding how the audience would expect, Hedwig stores the jewelry within her own chest and gives the coat to the household’s servant to be mended and cleaned. This final line is delivered so matter-of-factly and without remorse that, when I saw it, shivers ran down my spine. This is only one incredibly strong and horrifying example of this idea from a film that contains plenty of others. The performances from Hüller, Christian Friedel (as the commandant), and the rest of the cast brilliantly capture this disgusting, apathetic way of life under Nazi-occupied Polland while never dipping into heightened realism or absurdity. Glazer and the actors have no empathy for the characters (I know for a fact Hüller refused to/could not empathize with her character), and yet they still feel relatable in a startling way. We are shown them swimming, sharing meals, playing, and hosting familial gatherings in their opulent garden just like any "idyllic" family would. This hint of relatability is integral to the truth The Zone of Interest is examining; the truth that we, as humans, are all capable of this kind of evil as we are all capable of becoming apathetic.

The evil portrayed in The Zone of Interest does not come directly from active hate towards a group of people but, instead, is derived from the apathy and complicity of a family who is both surviving and thriving in the current structure of society. The audience is even party to this apathy in a way. The distant long shots keep us out of the story and render us unable to interfere or take part in the story. While in one way it keeps us from being intimate with the family, our distant viewership begins to feel like we are participating in our own form of complicit inaction. In this light, it becomes clear that Glazer and co. are desperately trying to convey through this rendering of one of humanity's darkest moments that apathy towards others' suffering, in any context, is one of the most evil acts imaginable. This probing and relevant warning along with the masterful artistry that supports it is the exact reason why The Zone of Interest is the greatest film of 2023 and why it deserves to be seen by every cognizant being on Earth. A real work of art that is pushing the medium forward on every artistic level.