The Zone of Interest (2023)
Review of The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer
As a master procrastinator, there are so many movies that I’ve been meaning to watch for years. As someone also runs a movie blog here on this website (check it out after this post!), I am also constantly reminded of this fact. A lot of the movies I’ve been watching recently are movies I procrastinated on.
The Zone of Interest I didn’t procrastinate for full-on years with at least. The movie came out in 2023, but it never worked out my schedule with the local AMC showtimes they’d show this with.
So I never got to see this on a big screen, but when I was on an 11.5 hour flight to Seoul, South Korea, I was delighted to see this as an option. It would be the first of many movies on this flight there, and even more so when considering the way back, too.
Despite knowing I had a long way ahead of me, I pressed play and sat back with my terrible vegetarian meal. I will never order the vegetarian meal on a United flight again—it has left me a little scarred if we’re going to be honest. It was that bad.
Not much to else to elaborate on here in the introduction, so let’s get into the review! I don’t want to bore you with the mundane details of my long flight.
The commander of Auschwitz and his family live next to the doomed concentration camp.
The Zone of Interest has a very specific subject: it’s Rudolf Höss, who was the commandant of Auschwitz in World War II. Throughout the course of the movie, we see how he lives right next to the concentration camp with his wife and five kids. If you had no idea what you were watching, you’d think their home is a cute cottage.
While they spend their gardens taking care of their beautiful home garden, or going out of the home to swim and fish in the countryside, we can occasionally hear what’s going on the other side of the wall. It’s barbed wire, and every so often the sound design is rigged so we can hear gunshots or screams.
There are also the occasional sound of trains or a furnace can be heard, adding to the horror elements of the history unfolding on the screen. When people are killed, too, the family is given their belongings sometimes.
Höss does his job and decides to build a new crematorium at the camp. He takes his kids to the river to swim, then realizes that there are human remains in the river; after that, he sends a message to the higher-ups chastising them for leaving evidence of their work in such an obvious place.
Hedwig, his wife, is dealing with her own problems throughout all of this. Her mother comes to stay with them, and tells her daughter that she has achieved so much through her marriage. They own quite a bit, adding to the more sinister element of how all of this came about.
Not long after her arrival, Höss gets a promotion and is asked to move near Berlin. He says no, but doesn’t tell Hedwig about the news as he knows she won’t want to move. He then requests that they are allowed to stay, which is approved by the officials.
We then see him have sex with another woman in his office. Earlier in the movie we caught glimpses of a Polish girl hiding food for the prisoners, and at this stage of the movie, we see her playing music written by one of them.
Hedwig’s mother leaves after seeing the crematorium and smelling the flesh being burned alive. She leaves behind a note, and Hedwig becomes very upset by it.
Höss is praised for his work and is given a major operation involving Hungarian Jews. This grants him the opportunity to go back to Auschwitz, which he takes. However, after attending a party, he tells Hedwig over the phone that he spent the time debating how to gas all of its attendees.
The movie ends with him looking into the darkness leaving his office. It cuts to the present day museum at Auschwitz, then back to Höss moving into the dark.
Overall Thoughts
This is a subtle horror movie at times, and if you go into it completely blind, you’re going to miss the subtle messages at first. It becomes more obvious once it’s unmasked who these characters are and what they’re doing, and the sound design definitely deserves a lot of praise for how it creates those horror elements.
Hedwig is one of the star characters to me—as someone more interested in women’s stories, she’s both trapped in complicit in what’s going on in the world beyond the walls of her garden. We can also see how the children grow up with this normalized, even if protected from the worst of the brutality.
All in all, it’s an interest portrait of how people can live right next to some of the biggest evils of the world. Give it a watch if you’re interested in the synopsis.
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