The Zone of Interest
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Distributed by: A24
Released: December 2023
Country: United Kingdom/United States/Poland
Eighty
years after the liberation of the Nazis’ most infamous
concentration camp, the name “Auschwitz” has evolved into a
shorthand moniker for man’s inhumanity to man. There have
been enough shows and movies about such places that one could put on
an extremely gloomy film festival on the subject. We are all
familiar with a few titles, perhaps: Mainstream fare such as
Schindler’s
List,
Sophie’s
Choice,
and the landmark 1970’s TV miniseries Holocaust;
arty films like The
Piano
and The
Boy in the Striped Pajamas;
heck, the BFF list includes, by my count, four films, including the
great Italian Life
is Beautiful,
that directly deal with the topic. Now comes the latest Best
International Film winner The
Zone of Interest,
set not inside but right outside the concentration camp, in the
agricultural area intended to buffer the distasteful reality from the
nearby Polish populace. This movie is no less about the Holocaust than the gritty reality of those easily
recognizable post-war news reels and pictures of hauntingly emaciated
bodies piled up in overcrowded bunks and the piles of dead in their
obscene graves.
![]() |
Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss |
focuses on real life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his young family. Each morning, Höss grabs his lunch pail and goes to work at the camp to do what you do as a concentration camp commandant: running the place, figuring out new ways to be more efficient, dealing with the highers-up, that kind of thing. Only we never actually see Höss at work—our story mostly takes place at his home just outside the walls. We see Höss picnicking with the fam, swimming with the boys, joking around with the wife. Some of it feels normal. Höss’s wife Hedwig even has her mom over and enjoys showing off to her the house and garden, as if to say, “Aren’t you proud of what I’ve become, Mutti?” Her mother is impressed except for the faint sound of gunshots and yells in the background, sounds that pervade throughout scene after scene. Even more disturbing is the normalcy of the Holocaust brought into the lives of the Höss family. The bucolic Polish setting is an ideal one for picnicking, swimming, and entertaining friends. The children suffer in ways even their parents cannot see.
![]() |
Showing mom the backyard pool |
The fly in the ointment for this family comes when Höss is offered a promotion to oversee all the concentration camps, meaning he would have to move to Berlin. When the wife hears of this, she says the same thing Karen Hill said to her husband in Goodfellas when he was considering witness protection—"It’s you they want, not me, right?” She pushes him to ask if the rest of the family can just stay in the home, even if he has to leave. He is hurt that it seems more important to her to keep the house than to keep him—another example of the human in the life of a man whose life’s purpose is inhumanity.
The Zone of Interest is a bleak, dreary movie, but at a running time of 105 minutes, it’s digestible enough. Director Johnathan Glazer’s filmography is fairly sparse, including the dark crime comedy Sexy Beast and the weird drama Birth—The Zone of Interest outdoes those two in terms of gloom. Even when husband and wife share a laugh, it doesn’t humanize them and in fact, they seem even more unlikeable. Glazer goes heavy on the metaphor toward the end of the film, assuring us that Höss’s fate will be appropriate to his actions.
The Title: The movie is based on an English novel, with the English title.
Culture: Recently, I got a chance to tour the Dachau concentration camp, near Munich. Dachau is smaller than Auschwitz, having been the one of the first and longest running camp. The camp is just east of the smallish town of Dachau, and to get there you take a bus through some of the town. The Bavarian town is a pretty little place with barber shops and clean streets and quaint storefronts, a sort of reminder that whatever was going on just a few minutes away in the camp, life went on as normal for many Germans. The contrast between Dachau and Dachau reminded me of the contrast between Auschwitz and the Zone of Interest, the horrors of the Holocaust nestled right up against such a pastoral setting, presumably with the faint sounds and smells from the ugliness so nearby.
Agenda danger: Johnathan Glazer made a good film that won an award so naturally he took the
![]() |
If you win, come up, accept your little award . . . and fuck off. |
opportunity to preach about geopolitics during his acceptance speech. Glazer bemoaned, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people." This virtue-signaling banality was in response to the state of Israel’s military response to the terrorist group Hamas unprovoked October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. I’m sure it made Glazer feel good about himself and all, but it brought to my mind the Ricky Gervais Golden Globes monologue of a few years prior: “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world…” If only more award winners took that advice.
Best Picture that year: Oppenheimer
Rating: A decent addition to the Holocaust sub-genre. Spielberg called it the best Holocaust film since Schindler’s List, which to me just seems like a way to allow him to mention Schindler’s List.