Until yesterday, the most uncomfortable I’d ever been while watching a film was David Lynch’s 1977 film “Eraserhead.” Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film “Zone of Interest” unseated it. While Lynch wanted to make a film where the ordinary was horrific, Glazer made a film where the horrific was ordinary.
An Ashkenazi Jew living in England, Jonathan Glazer felt that films about the Holocaust and the Nazi Party had become “mythologically evil,” and he wanted to make a film that demystifies them. Although he doesn’t mention it, I feel like one of the films he’s talking about here is “Schildner’s List,” which, although remarkable, feels operatic, which changes the emotional impact of the subject.
The film's development started when Glazer purchased the rights to the 2014 Martin Amis novel Zone of Interest. The novel is a fictionalized story of actual events concerning the family of the Commandant of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Glazer decided to drop the fictionality of Amis’ work and make his film about the actual man, Rudolf Höss, and his family.
Höss came to Poland from his previous post at the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. In 1945, Höss was tried, found guilty, and executed for his crimes at the Auschwitz camp. His victims were exterminated, and he was executed. That difference is important.
Glazer made some interesting choices in his portrayal of the story. To begin with, he never shows the interior of Auschwitz as it was when Höss was alive, but he does show some scenes of the camp as it is now, with the janitorial staff cleaning the death camp now a museum. All the action in the film set in the 1930s and 40s takes place in the “zone of interest” surrounding the camp, including his own home, separated from the camp by a ten-foot wooden fence. The buildings of the camp are visible above the fence.
Filmed on location, Glazer wanted the buildings to look new, as they would have in the thirties and forties. As a visual effects coordinator, his wife arranged for the tops of the Auschwitz barracks appearing over the garden fence to be made new again using digital effects. After almost eighty years, the original Höss home was in disrepair, so Glazer used a building within the zone similar to the Höss abode.
In the 2024 Academy Awards, “Zone of Interest” was nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director but won for Best Sound. Glazer had an original score made for the film but decided not to use it. Instead, he filled the empty aural space in the film with the hundreds of hours of special sound effects created by his regular collaborator, Johnnie Burn.
Sound design is an often overlooked aspect of film and theater. When I was younger, I researched Murray Spivack, the original Sound Designer for King Kong, including interviews with his family. From his family, I purchased Spivack’s original 1932 wooden maquette of King Kong and Meat Eater dinosaurs used to finalize the look of the creatures before making the far more expensive animation models. My wooden relic of the original film has looked over my shoulder for almost the entire twenty-first century.
Burn’s research for the film was extensive. Featuring all-new recordings, he sought out the exact type of guns and ammunition that would have been used in 1940s Auschwitz. His recording of an operating crematorium is a constant drone underlying the entire film. One of the most powerful scenes in the film comes when the mother-in-law of Höss comes to live with him, but she decides she must leave when she first sees (and smells) the smoke coming from the crematorium.
In 1941, Adolph Hitler issued the orders for his “final solution” and chose Auschwitz as the center of that operation. When soviet forces reached Auschwitz, the Germans had already destroyed their records of the camp. It’s estimated that between five hundred fifty thousand to one million one hundred thousand people were exterminated (murdered) in Auschwitz.
Höss had a German firm, Topf & Söhne, design the factory-like crematoriums for Auschwitz, but when trains containing the over four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews arrived, the crematoriums were not enough, and Höss ordered bodies burned in open pits to prevent their decay from creating a health problem for his men and his family.
Zone of Interest is not a comfortable film—it’s one of the most uncomfortable films I’ve ever seen. Glazer used what he termed the “Big Brother” method of filming, where multiple digital cameras are set up, without operators, in the area to be filmed. He then allows the actors to work without direction as he and the rest of the crew are out of sight in another room or another building. I hate that a show like “Big Brother” is now part of the cinematic vocabulary, but more and more directors are choosing this technique, so I guess it’s with us for a while.
The release of the film coincided with the strikes on Gaza in retaliation for the October Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, killing 1,139 Israelis and foreign nationals.
During his acceptance speech for Best Foreign Film, Glazer criticized the dehumanization of both the "victims of October the 7th in Israel" and "the ongoing attack on Gaza." Glazer was heavily criticized by some Jewish filmmaking community members and praised by others for criticizing both sides of the argument. I am not a Jew, and I don’t feel like I should weigh in on one side of this issue or the other. I will say that among his supporters were Joel Cohen and Tony Kushner.
I rented “Zone of Interest” in high definition from DirectTV for $4.99. I’m sure other providers offer a similar deal. You can rent it for $5.99 on Amazon.
If you’re sensitive, I would say not to try watching it. If you do, be aware that Glazer punctuates several places with blank screens and sound design. There’s nothing wrong with your TV; that’s part of his vision. While there is absolutely no gore or body horror in the film, it may still upset your stomach.