Toronto International Film Festival 2023: THE ZONE OF INTEREST: A Terrifying Formal Experiment

The first time I really noticed the brilliant cinematography of Łukas Żal was in the movie Cold War, where his haunting high contrast black-and-white compositions straddled the lines between film movement and painterly stillness that brought a distinguished look between characters and their surroundings. Żal’s brilliance is again on display in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. This time however, much of imagery is left to remain flat, a deliberate intention of the part of the filmmakers who chose to use no artificial lighting techniques.

A Terrifying Precise Vision

The premise is much more multi-dimensional and deceptive. The Nazi Höss family live an idyllic life in a nice house with a beautiful garden in the back. They go swimming near the lake, canoeing on the stream, and raise four children in a seemingly ethereal environment. They dress in bright white and Glazer films their central presence in the frame surrounded by lush greens and flowers of all the colors of the rainbow. But their home is flanked by gigantic barbed-wire walls. On the other side, is Auschwitz concentration camp, where the Höss family patriarch Nazi SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is a primary architect of the gas chambers. He is a man obsessed with “efficiency” in “processing cargo” and approaches his horrifyingly evil work with the methodical professionalism of an accountant.

Hannah Arendt’s often quoted ‘banality of evil’ is low-hanging fruit for films about Nazi operations, but Glazer breaks down and even expands on the cliché in starkly unique and terrifying ways. Despite the immediate pristine surroundings of their garden and the nonchalance of their operations under the Reich (Höss, at one point, answers the phone with “Heil Hitler, etcetera”), at night the pristine mask of their existence is shattered. The family is bombarded almost constantly with distant wailing voices, sirens, stormy rumblings, and beta waves that call to the nightmarish unrelenting soundscapes of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Whether these are coming from the camp or are simply part of the score, or even sounds coming from within the Höss household itself is left obscured and ambiguous. Glazer insists on the compartmentalization of evil and displays in his characters the demonic ways in which proximity and normalization can be conditioned so easily.

Next Door to Horror

When one of matriarch Hedwig Höss’s (an incredible Sandra Hüller performance) friends comes to visit they joke and laugh and she is amazed by the beauty of the place, but she begins to feel uncomfortable at having to bear even the slightest witness to the actual death that her people are causing. She is kept awake by a blood-red glow into her guest room window, she sees the smokestack ejecting billions of ashes like the bowels of hell erupting up from under the earth. She smells the char and ember. The next morning she leaves the house with no trace and no notice. Ingrid, so embarrassed and insulted by the departure, takes it out on the few Jews who clean her house, the few Jews she consistently reminds them, she has decided to keep alive. “I can have my husband spread your ashes in my flower garden” she says frankly eating her sausages and eggs.

Glazer makes the absence of violence a key in marking its undeniable and unforgettable presence. The only example of shots within the work camp are both completely silent, peripheral sequences. One is of a young girl who makes trips into the camp with bags of fruit and hides them in areas where the prisoners work. The other is in present day, where janitors in the Auschwitz memorial clean the floors and wipe the glass cases that hold the giant piles of preserved shoes and clothes of the victims of the camp. Scenes that are normally foreground in a normal family drama – like Höss’s reassignment to a different camp that threatens to tear the family apart and have them lose their home – are so plain compared to the horrors going on behind the scenes that they register as background filler.

Conclusion

The uber-formalistic approach of The Zone of Interest may strike some as unfeeling and morally empty. Glazer used embedded cameras in the house and many sequences comprised of improvised movements and no crew, just allowing the actors to go about their monotonous roles with little interference. The level of authenticity that was the aim of the film felt to me more genuine than most movies. The movie’s shots are so composed to precise points, and its artistic flourishes – the fade to red, the demonic lighting at night, the night-vision camerawork, the rumbling and crackling ambient score – elicited rare emotions. It’s a film that achieves the terror, ugliness, and glimpses of hope of other Holocaust films in daring and unique ways.

The Zone of Interest screened at TIFF on September 7th, 2023. It is set to release in U.S. theaters on December 8th, 2023.

Watch The Zone of Interest