Appalling Ambience — The Zone of Interest review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

There’s not all that much to “get" in The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s multi-Oscar nominated adaptation of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel of the same name. For all its considerable cinematic flair it arrives at its central, horrifying conceit fairly swiftly and never wavers from following it through to its numbing endpoint. Setting the film mostly on the edges of Auschwitz, Glazer’s first images are ones of bucolic bliss as a German family — mum, dad, children — enjoy a picnic near a beautiful lake before retreating to their well-appointed home after a grim discovery in the water. Their home’s edenic garden, we soon realise, shares a barbwire-adorned wall with the concentration camp, yet the tops of the chimneys billowing out smoke are the only other structures from inside its walls that Glazer permits us to see. Instead the film embeds us with that aforementioned family, headed up by Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the camp’s real-life commandant, and his wife Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), who takes great pride in being “the queen of Auschwitz” as she tends to her garden, looks after her children and entertains the friends who pop over to share in the abundance of goods sourced from the camp’s ongoing stream of new prisoners, none of whom we see.

All of this is presented matter of factly, with surveillance-like detachment. Yet working with his Under the Skin sound designer Johnnie Burn and composer Mica Levi, Glazer also underscores the grotesque irony of what we’re watching with a near-constant soundtrack of appalling ambience: screams, gunshots, the chilling hiss of the gas chambers, the clunking sound of the crematoria firing up — all of it treated by the Hoss family the way normal people might treat the white noise of bustling city. And that’s the point. There have been so many films about the Holocaust at this juncture that conventional cinema’s already limited capacity to explain its barbarity has long since been reached. Stripping away much of Amis’s source novel, what Glazer does instead is use the abstractions of the art movie to dramatise what Hannah Arendt termed "the banality of evil” so that this overused phrase itself regains some meaning.

The mundane minutia of the Hoss family’s daily existence is shocking not because we know what’s going on behind those walls but because we see the extent to which they do too, be it in the language they use to normalise it or the emotional barriers they construct to process it, the children included. As the film progresses, we also see tiny fissures emerge in those defences, but at no point are we expected to identify with the characters; there are no close-ups, none of them undergo a transformative reckoning. Whatever kindness exists in film is relegated to the quietly heroic actions of a young girl seen in hallucinatory interludes, the negative film stock Glazer uses another way of capturing the distorted reality of the camps.  It’s an audacious approach, one that builds to an unexpected ending that forces us to confront the extent to which such atrocities can’t and shouldn’t be forgotten or obscured.