Stanley Kubrick, gazumped in making a Holocaust film by the arrival of Schindler’s List, once remarked he didn’t think Steven Spielberg’s movie really focused on the topic. “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.”
As a Holocaust movie, The Zone of Interest by Brit and Jewish-raised Jonathan Glazer – possibly the most Kubrickian director of his generation – is in some ways even narrower than that.
It’s essentially about one man – a family man who tucked his children in at night – who killed as many as one million of those six million, a man who lived an otherwise pleasant life in the house and garden next to the factory where he did it.
It’s a Holocaust movie that manages to be an art statement that feels like it could be playing in a gallery on a loop.
It’s also a remarkably immersive, through-the-looking-glass portal to the neighbourhood around Auschwitz in what was Nazi-occupied Poland.
Glazer placed many cameras around his main setting, an actual house that backs onto the site today, and much of his film is an act of nonchalant domestic surveillance.
That gaze stays resolutely outside the camp’s perimeter. But from behind those high walls come an endless industrial rumble, the puffing of trains, crematorium smoke and fire glow, screams and gunshots.
So unsettling is the experience that it might make you reconsider other Holocaust movies, like Schindler’s List, and their stories of hope and survival. Or the constant stream of Holocaust fiction, which has become a genre, too.
It seems Glazer has reconsidered one writer’s approach. The Zone of Interest started out as an adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis book of the same name. The novel fictionalised a story of love and betrayal involving a Nazi officer, the wife of the commandant of Auschwitz, the commandant himself and a Jewish “Sonderkommando” collaborator, roped into the melodrama.
None of that remains in the film. Whereas Amis made thinly disguised fictional characters of Commandant Rudolf Höss and wife Hedwig, here, they are them, raising a brood of children with pool parties in that garden, or swimming in a local river occasionally polluted by something awful.
It’s their own slice of “Lebensraum” – the Nazi doctrine of living space. It’s a phrase Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) uses when she is pleading with Rudolf (Christian Friedel) to let her and the kinder stay when he is promoted to a higher posting in the Final Solution.
Much of the film is a humanising portrait of their marriage, one between people whose commitment to the Nazi cause is understated but absolute. One that has its terrible perks – Hedwig’s wardrobe is supplemented by fur coats and shoes that were worn by the women sent next door. There are plenty to choose from.
Hüller and Friedel are mesmerising in their respective roles, playing characters that are perfect illustrations of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, and who seem to be passing that on to at least one of their lederhosen-clad children.
Glazer occasionally interrupts this Aryan idyll with scenes of another storyline shot in a night-vision negative, which reminds of his 2013 sci-fi art film Under the Skin. But mostly, The Zone of Interest stays in the house of Höss, where you might catch yourself admiring the modernist furniture. But then out the window, that smoke and that rumble.
It’s a Holocaust movie with no body count, no hope and no reprieve. And once seen, no chance of being forgotten.
Rating out of five: ★★★★★
The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, is in cinemas now.
