History is very ugly. For every good person you can find, there’s a seemingly endless pool of atrocities and the lowest of the low. Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest sets its stage in one of the ugliest chapters of human history right next to arguably the main center for its horrors. It’s a bold move that sets the movie up to be a piercing look at life during World War II.
Hedwig and Rudolph and their family are beneficiaries of lebensraum, a policy of Nazi Germany that involved expanding German territories to the east to provide land and material resources for the German people, while driving out Jewish and Slavic people. Their home life seems to be idyllic, their kids go to school, Hedwig has built a beautiful garden, and Rudolph is extremely close to his work…as a leader of Auschwitz. They live their lives, completely desensitized or completely unbothered to what goes on outside their door. When some reshuffling in the leadership of the Nazi party happens, Rudolph and Hedwig try to figure out what their lives should look like.
The starkness with which Jonathan Glazer presents this story is commendable. I hesitate to use unflinching as a way to describe a movie like this because the film isn’t interested in showing us the atrocities so much as asking the audience to watch a family drama while history is happening a stone throw from their home. Deal with the mundanity of life locks in the actors and allows them to explore the nuance of the familial drama without needing histrionics.
The mundanity of the story is both it’s greatest strength and it’s fatal flaw. The film basking in the “regularness” of this family’s life is what makes it feel so harrowing. They are certainly evil and it’s unconscionable that humans could be so callous and evil as to do what they did. Participating in the Holocaust is one truly evil thing, there’s probably not words for living near a camp and being upset that you might have to leave the garden you grew.
However, mundanity can also be quite boring. Glazer relies on some experimental moments (part of the film is shot with thermal imaging cameras) but these moments while thematically important don’t generate any kind of oomph. They sometimes detract if we’re being honest. The movie features maybe three moments of real emotional significance and otherwise feels quite bland once you’ve settled into the fact that horrible people live regular lives too. How much of an impact does the whole enterprise have if it does not feel like the movie moved or moved you? Even the final shots, which clearly callback to a superior movie, don’t so much as land an emotional hammer as they do feel like an extra bit of flourish from a director who wanted it to land that way. The Zone of Interest is a fascinating film on its surface but for me it stopped there.