In 1943, Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife Hedwig and their five children in an idyllic home next to the camp. Höss takes the children out to swim and fish, and Hedwig spends time tending the garden. Servants handle chores and the prisoners' belongings are given to the family. Beyond the garden wall, gunshots, shouting and sounds of trains and furnaces are audible.
Höss approves the design of a new crematorium, which soon becomes operational. Höss notices human remains in the river. He gets his children out of the water and sends a note to camp personnel, chastising them for their carelessness. It is implied that he has sexual relations with prisoners in his office. Meanwhile, a Polish girl who lives nearby sneaks out every night, hiding food at the prisoners' work sites for them to find and eat.
Höss receives word that he is being promoted to deputy inspector of all concentration camps and must relocate to Oranienburg, near Berlin. He objects to no avail and withholds the news from Hedwig for several days. Hedwig, deeply attached to their home, begs him to convince his superiors to let her and the children remain. The request is approved and Höss moves. Hedwig's mother comes to stay, but is horrified at the sight of the crematorium flames at night and departs, leaving behind a note that an irate Hedwig burns after reading.
Months after arriving in Berlin, in recognition of his work, Höss is tasked with heading an operation named after him that will transport 700,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz to be killed. This allows him to move back to Auschwitz and reunite with his family. He vacantly attends a party celebrating the operation, and confesses to Hedwig over the phone that he spent his time there thinking about the most efficient way to gas the room.
As Höss leaves his Berlin office descending a stairway, he stops and retches repeatedly and stares into the darkness. In the present day, a group of janitors clean the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Back in 1943, Höss proceeds downstairs.
The Zone of Interest was 10 years in the making.[8] After completing Under the Skin, Glazer became intrigued by the then not-yet-published Martin Amis novel The Zone of Interest. He optioned the novel after reading it. Paul and Hannah Doll, the novel's two main characters, were loosely based on Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife Hedwig. Glazer opted to use the historical figures instead and conducted two years of extensive research into the Hösses.[9] He made several visits to Auschwitz and was profoundly affected by the sight of the Höss residence.[10] He collaborated with the Auschwitz Museum and other organisations, and obtained special permission to access the archives, where he examined testimonies provided by survivors and individuals who had been employed in the Höss household. By piecing together these testimonies, Glazer gradually constructed a detailed portrayal of the individuals connected to the events.[11][12] He also consulted historian Timothy Snyder's 2015 book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning during his research.[9]
Glazer confirmed development of the project in 2019, with A24, Film4, Access Entertainment and House Productions co-financing and producing.[13][14] Friedel first met Glazer and producer Jim Wilson in London in 2019 for the role of Rudolf Höss. Although daunted by Glazer and Wilson's description of their film project, Friedel felt compelled too. Friedel, who had first met Hüller in 2013 while acting together in the historical drama Amour Fou, recommended her for the role of Rudolf's wife Hedwig.[15] Hüller was first sent an excerpt of the script, an argument between Rudolf and Hedwig presented out of context, before learning the project's nature as a film about the Holocaust. Although she had resolved never to play a Nazi, Hüller was convinced after reading the full script and meeting with Glazer, believing that he shared and addressed her concerns about how to properly depict Nazism on screen. Hüller's own dog, a black Weimeraner, plays Dilla, the Höss family dog in The Zone of Interest.[16]
The young Polish girl in the film is inspired by a woman named Alexandria, whom Glazer met during his research. As a 12-year-old member of the Polish resistance, she used to cycle to the camp to leave apples for the starving prisoners. As in the film, she discovered a piece of music written by a prisoner. The prisoner, named [[1]] Joseph Wulf, survived the camp and was one of the first people to document the atrocities of the Holocaust, a cause he dedicated his life to. Alexandria was 90 years old when she met Glazer and died shortly after. The bike the film uses and the dress the actress wears both belonged to her.[8]
Filming
The former house of Rudolf Höß in Oświęcim (photo taken in 2012)
The original Höss house has been a private residence since the end of the war. Production designer Chris Oddy spent several months converting a derelict home beyond the camp wall into a replica of the Höss residence, and started planting the garden in April 2021 so that it would be in bloom when filming began.[9] Principal photography began in Auschwitz in summer 2021 and lasted approximately 55 days.[9][10] Additional filming took place in Jelenia Góra in January 2022.[17]
The film was shot on Sony Venice digital cameras equipped with Leica lenses.[18] Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal embedded up to 10 cameras in and around the house and kept them running simultaneously, with no crew on set. The approach, which Glazer dubbed "Big Brother in the Nazi house", allowed the actors to improvise and experiment extensively during filming.[9][10][12] Glazer and Żal aimed for a modern look and did not wish to "aesthetize" Auschwitz. As a result, only practical and natural lighting was used.[19]
Glazer did not want the atrocities occurring inside the camp to be seen, only heard. He described the film's sound as "the other film" and "arguably, the film".[10] To that end, sound designer Johnnie Burn compiled a 600-page document containing relevant events at Auschwitz, testimonies from witnesses, and a large map of the camp so that the distance and echoes of the sounds could be properly determined.[20] He spent a year building a sound library before filming began, which included sounds of manufacturing machinery, crematoria, furnaces, boots, period-accurate gunfire and human sounds of pain. He continued building the library well into the shoot and post-production.[21][22] Most of Mica Levi's score went unused, as Glazer and Burn did not want to have the film "sweetened or dramatized" by it. The music Levi wrote for the prologue remained, as did soundscapes created for several sequences and a sound collage for the epilogue.[23]
Music
English musician Mica Levi and sound designer Johnnie Burn composed the music and sound effects of the film, which resemble Levi's 2016 scoring of the film Jackie.[24][25]
The film was released for digital platforms on February 20, 2024.[39]
Reception
Box office
In its opening weekend the film made $124,000 from four theatres.[40] Following its five Oscar nominations, the film expanded from 215 theatres to 333 in its seventh week of release and made $1.08 million, an increase of 141% from the previous weekend, and a running total of $3 million.[41]
Critical response
The Zone of Interest premiered to critical acclaim.[a] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 300 reviews are positive for the film, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The website's critics consensus states, "Dispassionately examining the ordinary existence of people complicit in horrific crimes, The Zone of Interest forces us to take a cold look at the mundanity behind an unforgivable brutality."[49] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 58 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[50]
Kevin Maher of The Times called it a "landmark movie, hugely important, that's unafraid of difficult ideas."[51] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called it a "devastating Holocaust drama like no other, which demonstrates with startling effectiveness [director Jonathan Glazer]'s unerring control of tonal and visual storytelling."[52] Donald Clarke of The Irish Times wrote, "Glazer may yet get in some trouble for taking such a formal approach to sensitive material. But, if anything, that self-imposed discipline – and utter lack of sentimentality – speaks to the profound respect he has for the subject."[53] Raphael Abraham of the Financial Times wrote, "Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane — by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror."[54] Jonathan Romney of Screen International wrote that the film "eschews false rhetoric, leaving maximum space for the audience's imaginative and emotional response."[55]
David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised Glazer's camera process for instilling "a flattening evenness into a film where the lack of drama becomes deeply sickening unto itself."[56]Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Through painstaking framing and sound design, its horrors gnaw at the edge of every shot."[57] In a 4-star review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it "a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste," while also praising the "superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn."[58]
Writing for Worldcrunch, the German critic Hanns-Georg Rodek wrote: "Here's the first question The Zone of Interest doesn't answer: [is it a film that showcases] ignorance? Of course it isn't. [Does it show] conscious approval based on racist and nationalist delusion? I'm sure it [does]. Is it longing for an idyll in the midst of a situation perceived as threatening? Without a doubt. There are many attempts at an explanation, but they don't really interest Jonathan Glazer. Glazer describes the situation in what is possibly more oppressive than anything we've seen in Holocaust films before. It concentrates in one garden the attitude of an entire nation that wanted to know nothing."[59]
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg praised the film, calling it the best Holocaust film ever made since his own Schindler's List (1993), saying "It's doing a lot of good work in raising awareness, especially about the banality of evil."[60][61] Filmmaker Todd Field also praised the film, saying "For those familiar with Glazer's films it's no surprise his approach here is unencumbered by tropes, genre conceits, or the cinematic shorthand we often take for granted. Over his twenty-four-year career as one of our finest filmmakers, Glazer has consistently executed high-wire interpretations of genre, and in the process completely reinvented them: crime (Sexy Beast), the paranormal (Birth), science fiction (Under the Skin). His pictures within these frames are mind-blowingly unique, as if he’d never seen anything that had been done before."[62]
Conversely, Italian film critic Davide Abbatescianni's review published by Cineuropa was less positive. He criticized the film for its disturbing atmosphere, which he found to be well-crafted but monotonous, and for the performances of the cast that he felt could not bring any change to the concept presented in a film that he thought lacked variety and remained stagnant for two hours.[63]Richard Brody from The New Yorker wrote "the movie is an extreme form of Holokitsch; it’s this year’s “Jojo Rabbit.”.[64]
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