‘The Zone of Interest’: The Horror Film You Never Asked For but Need to See
In the spirit of October, a horror film review
British filmmaker and descendant of Bessarabia Jews, Jonathan Glazer (Under The Skin, 2013) made this Holocaust movie, The Zone of Interest, from the Nazi’s perspective in 2023. It was nominated for 5 Oscars including Best Picture and won two Academy Awards in 2024.
Shot from a Fly on the Wall perspective, Glazer used ten cameras dispersed around the leading characters’ house and garden like a reality TV show. The viewer witnesses the banal lives of this rich German family whose husband/father happens to be Auschwitz Concentration Camp Head, Rudolf Höss.
The side you see most of in the film is Rudolf and his wife, Hedwig, living bougie adjacent but somehow also mundanely with their 5 children in a world where everything looks pleasant: the woods, the river, to picnic, and even a beautiful garden on the side of the house that Hedwig takes great pride in when her mother visits. But upon further scrutiny, you realize the acts of evil that punctuate day-to-day life.
Hedwig, coined “The Queen of Auschwitz” spends her days with her servants (prisoners saved from the camp). She meets with friends — other Nazi wives — in the small town where they shop not in a store but from a wheelbarrow delivering articles of clothing to her home. She has lunch with the other women mentioning casually how clever “they” are, hiding jewels in their tubes of toothpaste.
But possibly one of the creepiest scenes involves Hedwig and a tube of lipstick found in a stolen fur coat.
As for the husband, he is always about work, work, work, which in this case is about finding a quicker, more efficient way to murder innocent people.
Historically the camp was dirty, as were his sexual deviances with prisoners which you see a small slice of in the film via a secret underground tunnel. He built it so he could go from the camp to his house freely and carry out his affair with Austrian communist political prisoner, Eleonore Hodys.
But in his family life, everything is scrubbed clean. Even the slightest sign of dirt crossing over sends him running with his boots and with something floating in the water as his family canoes in the rain.
When pieces of black coal and debris hit his perfectly pale face as he looks on at the violence inside the camp, he lets it engross him, standing stationary in place.
Sent Away to Berlin
He is sent to Berlin to work, leaving his family behind — at his wife’s insistence — she doesn‘t want to leave “paradise” and keeps the family in Auschwitz.
That is when you realize he is just a cog in the killing machine. He does what he is told, maybe too well. Even when he attends a ball filled with fancy-dressed people of his kind, he can’t shake his need to destroy them.
He shares his feelings with his wife over the phone, talking about his day and you can tell she couldn’t care less. He seems isolated in his thoughts and feelings. What the movie doesn’t show, but seems possible, is the disconnection they seem to share: i.e. they are sleeping in separate twin beds.
Hedwig, no matter the cost, wants to keep her elite post as Queen and Angel of Auschwitz, both nicknames made by the prisoners. Not mentioned in the film, Hedwig is cheating on her husband too; with another political prisoner, while her husband is away.
The White Noise
What makes this movie scary, even though no actual violence is seen on camera, is the soundtrack.
The children have a birthday party in the garden surrounded by flowers, and a swimming pool. The wall of the garden, lined in barbed wire, is shared with the camp. The only other sign of what goes on behind it is the white noise.
The dogs barking aggressively, the machine guns going off and the people screaming is their everyday melody and it never stops.
During the filming of the movie, the house that the Höss family lived in was discovered to still exist. But it was occupied. Then a house identical to the original was found right down the street. Derelict and linked to the Auschwitz museum, the owners let them fix it up and turn it into the original house and garden of Hoss for the set.
In the movie, a young German girl seems to be the only savior for the slave labor camp part of Auschwitz. She rides her bike late at night, distributing apples by hiding them in the dirt for the prisoners to eat. Somehow, going unnoticed.
The woman who did this as a child was still alive when they started filming and was finally able to tell her story at 97.
She allowed the film crew to borrow her old bike and dress from when she was a girl. After getting the story off her chest, before the movie is even completed, she died.
There are several scenes hinting at what’s going on behind the wall but even when you see a group of Nazi higher-ups meet in Berlin with Hoss, the group talks in jargon.
Perhaps to make it seem less evil and more just like protocol, they are more able to stomach their mission. When Hoss more specifically calls out what they are talking about, they call him brutal and the man for the job.
But then there is one scene, where Hoss’s young son, alone in his room, is playing. It feels innocent, almost boring to watch. The whole scene is lost if you aren’t listening.
Daughter Becomes Balenciaga Model
In real life, one of the daughters grows up and moves to Madrid in the 1950’s to be a model for the new fashion house, Balenciaga.
Meanwhile, hiding who her father was and working for a Jewish woman in the fashion industry. One night after drinking with the other employees she admits who she is. The Jewish woman decides to keep her employed because she was just a child when it happened and it wasn’t her fault.
From ages 7 to 11 she lived with her family in the ‘villa’ next to Auschwitz. She would play tag with her siblings in old prisoner uniforms which maddened her father, a crossing over of the two worlds. She would see prisoners every day and she said they seemed very happy.
Their house was two stories, so from certain bedroom windows, it was confirmed, you could see over the top of the wall into one of the barracks and the old crematorium where her father would experiment with cyanide capsules. She claims to have known nothing.
Hero
Writer, Thomas Harding (whose great-uncle tracked and arrested Hoss of his crimes) interviewed Hoss’s daughter Brigitte in 2014 and again in 2023. He learned that Hedwig did know what her husband was doing even though this movie says she was innocent. Even though “it made her sad,” and she would give prisoners food or hire them to renovate her villa (which would mean they could avoid death), she believed in the same thing as her husband, “the Final Solution”.
Frighteningly, the daughter says as an adult about her dad, “He was a wonderful, absolute wonderful person. I couldn’t have wished for a better father.”
Even in 2023, when pressed about her father she could barely admit what he did and wanted to pretend like her life began in 1947, after the hanging of her father for his crimes. Two months after the interview, she dies.
This real-life horror film is a must-see. It makes you think about things more deeply. It is a good reminder that evil exists in the world even if people deny it. Truth is scarier than fiction.
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