In many ways, the Zone of Interest plays like a psychological horror film except the residents never realize the land is cursed and they are the monsters.
The Zone of Interest focuses on Rudolf and Hedwig Höss as they deal with raising a family, disappointing reassignments at work, and running Auschwitz, a concentration and death camp. The movie is at its strongest when it normalizes the horror whether it’s Hedwig’s maids picking clothes from the dead, Rudolf hearing a business proposal for a new crematorium, or when a memo circulates around the Nazi party praising Rudolf for his hard and exemplary work in building and perfecting Auschwitz. The memo showering him with praise sounds exactly like the memo your boss sends you when you get a raise.
Even when it’s showing you the Höss family engaging in normal activities like celebrating a birthday, eating dinner together, or Rudolf and Hedwig joking with each other, these moments of idyllic German life is interrupted by screams, gunfire, the prisoner Hedwig uses to manage her garden, the prisoner who washes Rudolf’s boots of blood, and the prisoner who brings Hedwig a fur coat stolen from someone recently killed in Auschwitz. The horror surrounds the entire family, but only if the viewer knows to look and listen. There is a beautiful moment when the film lingers on the many flowers in the garden with only the camp sounds and you slowly realize the flowers are to disguise the smell of the camp next door.
And that’s where the horror comes in. The viewer themselves know what is happening but no one on screen acknowledges it except through throwaway dialogue like “oh the Jews are over the wall”. Even when Rudolf explains what he does to his son it is in pseudo-corporate speak. He improves the camp’s processes, striving for efficiency. No mention of the human lives he’s taking or the processes he’s “improving”. In fact, Rudolf and Hedwig are very proud of their work and when it’s threatened to be taken away because of Rudolf’s transfer, Hedwig throws a fit telling him to “Call Hitler”.
Not only is the disconnect with reality pathological, but so is the apathy. Except for Hedwig who shows great joy in showing off her house and garden to her mother, no one in the film truly shows any emotion greater than a mild acceptance of this life. Despite having the “perfect” life, it is drained of all joy and meaning, although the characters themselves don’t seem to realize it.
The Zone of Interest is at its best when it denies the viewer relief from the mundanity of the horrors of the Holocaust. It’s weakest moment is when Hedwig’s mother leaves the house without a word because she realizes they burn humans at the camp. It didn’t feel earned and it breaks the horrifying tension that for the Höss family and other Nazis, this is just a job and a part of life. There is no one to say it’s wrong, because no one believes it’s wrong. Even when a maid secretly hides food for camp prisoners, it is done silently and without fanfare because this too is just a part of life in the Nazi regime. You work at the Höss family’s house and alleviate your conscience by leaving food for a handful of prisoners.
The most powerful moment of the movie is the very ending, when the tension becomes almost unbearable and Rudolf finally pushes the viewer over the edge by calling his wife and saying he is as “happy as punch” to return to Auschwitz and help process and murder 700,000 Hungarian Jews and the operation is going to be called Operation Höss. His wife’s only reply is “it’s late. Tell me about when you get home”. As Höss walks through the halls, enjoying his “victory” the movie gut punches the viewer by jumping ahead to modern times at the Auschwitz-Birkenau historical museum. We follow a cleaning crew as they prepare the museum for the upcoming day, the camera lingering on piles and piles of shoes and mobility aids. While the horror of what Höss did washes over you it’s followed by the horror of the mundanity of the cleaning crew. They don’t even seem to notice the remains of the Nazi’s victims as they sweep floors and wash windows. The greatest horror of the 20th century has been swallowed and neutralized until it became a normal part of all our lives. Maybe a destination to visit and spend a day grappling with the horror, but a horror that is quickly pushed to the back of our minds as soon as we leave the museum. The film cuts back to Rudolf who walks down the stairs, content to do his job, because in the world we currently live in, anything can be normalized.
