Cinema Without Borders: Of clean-handed cruelty—The Zone of Interest

The opening sequence of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest envelops you with an inexplicable unease even though, seemingly, there’s nothing amiss. Just two happy families on a picnic by the river. This ‘eerie in the idyllic’ feel sets the tone for what is to follow in the film set in the Nazi era Germany. It won the second highest honour, the Grand Prix, at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.

While inspired by the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name, Glazer’s film strays away from the central love triangle of the book to put the household of the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp under the microscope for all its 106 minutes duration. What’s more, it doesn’t fictionalize the characters, names them after real people and inventively inserts the present-day Auschwitz Museum into the fictional narrative towards the finale. All to underscore and remind us of how truth can be way more heinous than what can be imagined, shaped, and created in the human mind.

So, we have Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest serving commandant of Auschwitz. He was one of the moving forces behind “Final Solution” genocide of the Jews and responsible for killing millions through his experiments with the gas chambers. Sandra Hüller plays his wife Hedwig. Together they are planning the perfect home for their family in a lavish villa and sprawling garden right next to the camp, even as new chambers are being designed in their neighbourhood for more efficient extermination of the inmates in the future. Irony couldn’t get more horrific.

Glazer plays with the form, frames and sound. He constructs the film like a still art installation of sorts, quietly highlighting the human perversities and monstrousness. It’s the lack of overt emotions, drama, propulsion and tension in the narrative that prove effective in striking an understated, sensitive chord.

Glazer’s cold and clinical, and ostensibly dispassionate, cinematic scrutiny, in fact takes down the passivity of the film's privileged characters, renders the essential situation beyond ghastly and gruesome. 

The camera is like a scalpel with which Glazer goes about dissecting inhumanity in all its vivid shades. Quite like Luis Buñuel’s 1972 classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he rips into the world of the entitled. They are self-centred, selfish, tone-deaf, and apathetic towards anything beyond their personal circle of friends, family, and acquaintances. No value is ascribed to a human life that exists beyond their own zone of interest.

Friedel and Hüller are astoundingly chilling in portraying Höss’ single-minded pursuit of a good life and indifference towards all the critical goings-on around them. He is an ambitious officer, not happy at the impending transfer which will take him away from the comforts offered by Auschwitz but unquestioning and unwavering in following the orders that come down to him from the top.

She is the lady of leisure, the Queen of Auschwitz as it were. Her volitional obliviousness to acts of violence around her makes her a silent participant, complicit in brutality. And then in one deft stroke by Glazer, we see her reveal the depths of cruelty within her. They look innocuous on the surface and more fanatical because of it. 

Violence is not overt but embedded in the mundane, it is implicit in the day to day. There is no acknowledgment of the enormity of crimes, no sense of remorse or penitence for atrocities in the purveyors of it, and, in turn, no redemption either. Oppression and oppressiveness are all.

The Zone of Interest is a damning indictment of silent complicity of the complacent masses. It doesn’t just make for a significant addition to the existing genre of Holocaust cinema but is a cautionary tale for the present and the future against intolerance, apathy, dehumanization, and despotism and more so not having a will and voice to counter them.