Here’s one of the most impressive, and very disturbing, films about WWII we think we’ve ever seen.
The Zone of Interest (2023) was adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel. Directed by Johnathan Glazer, it stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller—it’s based on the real story of Auschwitz commandment officer Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig.
Unique in its approach to this subject matter, few of the notorious holocaust atrocities are seen. Instead, viewers get an insight into the mundanities of the Höss family life—their home located directly alongside the concentration camp.
Ordinary Domestic Horror in The Zone of Interest
Martin Amis’ 2014 eponymous novel was loosely based on Höss. For this screenplay, Glazer decided to adapt the novel entirely to focus on the real-life events of Höss’s family life.
After two years of research, he was able to piece together a very accurate depiction of the family home. The Zone of Interest was filmed on-site at Auschwitz, with a house near the Höss family home adapted faithfully by the crew. The result was a pretty much spot on recreation of the home circa 1943.
Glazer also did away with any fancy Hollywood flourishes.
There’s no fancy gloss over the film, impressive tricks, or anything else—the family moves in and around the home, living life day-to-day, doing normal daily things.
Where things start to take a strange turn are when you hear the stuff going on around their house.
The Höss family lived right next to Auschwitz concentration camp, with Rudolph Höss riding a horse into the grounds each morning. His job was to think of increasingly efficient ways to murder as many Jews as possible.
Meanwhile, Hedwig is a doting housewife who looks after the kids, home, garden, and takes great pride in it all (as she boasts to her mother during a friendly visit).
We watched the film twice over consecutive days. Initially, we were shocked by what we thought was the extreme selfishness of the characters. There is some element of that, but then we realised it’s more they’re normalised to the carnage and desensitised to it. Or just uncaring.
What’s disturbing is they are incredibly normal.
Rudolf Höss is a keen family man who loves animals and can’t bear the thought of any animal being injured. He’s devoted to his job, amicable, calm, patient, professional.
It’s this bizarre countenance to the chaos he oversees that leads to one of the film’s most disturbing and unforgettable scenes. As brief as it is, WARNING as this section is very disturbing.
His wife Hedwig, played so brilliantly by Sandra Hüller, isn’t as amicable as her husband.
Self-absorbed, cruel, shallow, spoiled, and lost in her own little world, she’s a curious individual. She has this odd, shuffling walk of continuous minor belligerence that highlights all she’s thinking about is getting her own way.
Whilst she scurries about, their family life plays out to a soundscape of hellish background noise. You don’t see anything going on in the Auschwitz camp, all you hear are the sounds.
It plays out like a horror film. And works so well as you only ever see this family doing the most ordinary things, all to the backdrop of hellish screams, gunfire, and mayhem. The eeriness of that won’t leave you. As the point of The Zone of Interest is to hear the film, so make sure the volume is up and pay close attention to the subtitles. Otherwise the purpose and real impact of this one will pass you by.
As you get drawn into their world of normality, cut off from the atrocities, the film builds to its ending.
Finally, there’s a hint that in his subconscious Höss may have some sort of psychological battle. He stoops on some steps and retches repeatedly. Although he seems even quite detached from that, as if indifferent.
Zone of Interest plays out with no significant plot developments. The most noticeable issue is when Rudolph Höss is transferred to a different station, with his wife refusing to leave the family home.
The husband amicably agrees to her decision and will journey back to Auschwitz when he has free time. Employment-based family disputes, playing out with a concentration camp next door.
It’s very eerie. It makes you think. It unsettles as the mundanity of day-to-day life can sit easily alongside the most appalling genocide.
As difficult as the film’s subject matter is, this is a very impressive piece of work. We feel it demands a few viewings to fully appreciate its unique take on those awful atrocities, after which its importance will be apparent to anyone with a sense of humanity.
The Fate of Rudolf Höss
Rudolf Höss was one of the worst offenders for war crimes during WWII. Quite the achievement given how detestable the Nazis were. It took a year for the Allies to catch up with him, but he was arrested after the defeat of Nazi Germany and convicted in Poland during the Nuremberg trials.
Whilst incarcerated, the Allies forced him to write a diary.
If what he wrote was genuine, he did come to show some level of remorse for his actions. Four days before his 16th April 1947 execution, held in the grounds of Auschwitz (at the request from holocaust survivors), he wrote in his diary.
“My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the ‘Third Reich’ for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.”
He had five children with Hedwig. His wife died in 1989 at the age of 81.
One of his daughters was Inge-Brigitt Höss, who died in October 2023 at the age of 90. In late 2021 she provided her last interview, which was with The Guardian in Mum Knew What Was Going On. She maintained a strong level of denial about her father when pressed about the matter.
“I still don’t believe it because there were people on top of him, who made him do this.”
How do you weigh something like that up in your mind? She was just a child when it all played out.
A comparison can be drawn to Heinrich Himmler’s daughter Gudrun. She died in May 2018 aged 88 with the German state monitoring her activities across her whole life. She remained a staunch Nazi and defended her father’s actions to the end.
The Production of The Zone of Interest
The lead actors had pledged never to play Nazis in their acting careers. However, due to the unique nature of the project and its many qualities they went ahead.
Sandra Hüller is the more famous name outside of Germany, having starred in Anatomy of a Fall (2023) and the cult classic comedy Toni Erdmann (2016).
As mentioned earlier, director Jonathan Glazer spent two years researching the family and meticulously piecing together details about the time and place. The attention to detail is extreme. For example, there are night shots seemingly divorced from the rest of the narrative. A young Polish girl can be seen hiding apples for prisoners to find and eat.
This was based on Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, who actually did this when she was 16, alongside sneaking messages in and out of the Auschwitz grounds.
Glazer’s intention for the film was also to unsettle viewers in a new way. To make the film different to the likes of Schindler’s List (1993—Steven Spielberg, incidentally, has hailed this film as good as his masterpiece). To achieve his goal, Glazer spent a year sourcing sound effects, some of which were taken from Parisian riots in 2022.
The way its shot makes The Zone of Interest feel distinctly modern. The fact it was shot at Auschwitz is unnerving, with the shoot lasting 55 days after beginning in the summer of 2021.
The director’s intention was to remind viewers these were human beings, which is why there’s a forensic approach to their personalities.
All of which contributes to the continuous importance of projects like this. Some may wonder why WWII films have continuously been made 80 years on from the end of the war. Then you look at what’s happening across the world, the rise of the far-right, and the world’s richest man making Seig Heil salutes to the watching world.
That is why The Zone of Interest, cinema, and culture remain essential as a voice of opposition.
