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Most films about World War II focus either on the horrors on the battlefield or the horrors inside the concentration camps. But director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest tells a very different story about life for one German family during the war.
The Zone of Interest takes a look at the day-to-day lives of the Höss family. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) serves as the commandant of Auschwitz. And while he spends his days making arrangements for transport and work camps and crematoriums, his family lives a happy, carefree life in a comfortable house on the other side of the camp’s wire-topped wall. When Rudolf learns that he’s being transferred out of Auschwitz, his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), refuses to leave, preferring to remain in the home and spacious garden that they’d always dreamed of giving their family.
While thousands of people suffer and die just feet from their home, the family members simply go about their everyday lives, seemingly unaffected by the horrors of the Holocaust. In fact, if it weren’t for the film’s setting, it would be incredibly dull. It’s a simple film with very little action or emotion, yet that’s what makes it so disturbing.
The family’s cold and careless attitude toward the things that are happening on the other side of their garden wall just makes the tedium of the film feel so harsh. For Rudolf, it’s all business. It’s meetings with colleagues and engineers to discuss how best to kill large groups of prisoners and dispose of their bodies. For Hedwig, it means gaining pretty dresses and fur coats and French perfume from the prisoners’ belongings—and laughing with friends about it over coffee. For the whole family, it means pool parties and fun-filled play dates and afternoons spent gardening to a soundtrack of gunshots and screams.
Admittedly, the fact that there’s very little story here makes it all the more difficult to watch. It’s slow and quiet and subtle, taking some liberties with the facts to focus more on the ideas than the details. And in doing so, it leaves viewers to soak in the heartlessness of it all.
Without its concentration camp backdrop, The Zone of Interest would be just a slice-of-life portrait of a German family in the 1940s. Instead, it’s rather simple but altogether disturbing—a cautionary tale about the normal, everyday people who went about their lives without a second thought to the horrors playing out all around them.
The Zone of Interest is currently playing in select theaters.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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