By Johnny Hill
What is pure evil?
Is it a cartoonish supervillain, whose every act is one of misdeed and villainy? Is it in the form of a raving psychopath, or a paranoid sociopath? Or, as Jonathan Glazer’s newest film The Zone of Interest depicts, is pure evil that of a family relaxing idly next to the river, having a picnic whilst ignoring the horrors they are responsible for being perpetrated merely metres away?
Surely Hannah Arendt’s famous idea of the “banality of evil” will be fervently discussed in relation to Glazer’s quietly terrifying movie. And for good reason. Just as Arendt described Adolf Eichmann as evil for being complacent about and accepting to his horrific actions, Glazer presents the evil inherent in Rudolf Höss (played coldly by Christian Friedel), Auschwitz commandant, and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), depicting their terrifying normalcy alongside the atrocities they and those under their command committed.
The Zone of Interest opens with a long, still black screen. Mica Levi’s alien and threatening soundtrack swells, establishing how the film wishes to follow inhuman humans who, like classical concepts of music juxtaposed with the unearthly sounds of Levi’s score, are familiar to us in their structure but also utterly twisted by an evil that rests beneath a monotonous veil. Eventually, the physical darkness lifts. We see the Höss family, swimming in the lake, laughing and playing. The camera remains still throughout this and through most of the movie, with Łukasz Žal’s cinematography acting as a pervasive look into the lives of atrocious murderers, a view that yields no humanity to the subjects on the screen, just as the Nazis offered no humanity to the Jewish people. After seeing the perfectly crafted Höss house, Glazer allows the viewer the first look into the horrors that lie so close, rotating the camera from Rudolf Höss’ joy for his birthday present from his children, to that of the Auschwitz camp wall, lined with barbed wire and making up the outer walls of the Höss residence.
It is through these little glimpses into what lies beyond the Höss’ residence – the barbed wire in the corners of the screen, the plumes of smoke from the camp rising in the air beyond the focus of the shot, the sounds of constant gunshots and screams in the distance – that Glazer simultaneously brings attention to the horrors occurring and the horror of the Höss’ complete disregard of the results of the atrocities. Glazer expertly plays with the uncertain and unknown and its boundless horrors to further emphasise the inhumanity of the Höss’, who revel in the beauty of their man made garden of Eden whilst also in the middle of the hell they have helped create.
Glazer’s restraint in keeping the camera still, the sparseness of the soundtrack and the washed-out, muted colours of the film never once allows any doubt to emerge as to the absolute evil of the characters it follows, and thus highlights the failure of the evils on display to recognise their own outrageousness. As we follow Rudolf Höss, our disbelief and anger grows more and more at his complete disregard for human life, the bureaucratic and mechanical nature of his ‘work’, and his ability to act as a happy human, when he has taken that right away from so many.
Whilst Glazer’s film is built around the ‘banality of evil’ and highlights it extremely effectively through creating a tense atmosphere, like a giant wave forever looming larger over you, the film also exceeds Arendt’s basic idea. Through experimental glimpses of the experiences of others, such as a Polish character being shot solely in skewed thermal imaging, Glazer also comments on the role of minorities in storytelling. Hints of the concentration camp and Glazer’s secondary following of the innocent Polish character indicates that, although obscured by either the towering house of the Nazi commandant or by darkness and lack of colour, these stories will always persist as the story of the victims, stronger than that of the evildoers. Perhaps Glazer intends this as a comment on narrative cinema itself, depicting the strength of the untold stories of cinema over those of what is shown, with a distinct lack of any plot or expected shock value in The Zone of Interest eschewing traditional cinematic techniques and narrative structure to give no sense of story to the Nazis, and to instead emphasise the oppressed.
Moreso, Glazer comments on how evil appears in society today – how unrecognisable it may be – and how, despite its attempts to erase the stories of others, the true stories of the survivors will always trump those of banal evil.
Through depicting the horrific and blasé nature of Rudolf Höss and his family, Glazer’s film depicts how evil lurks at the surface, under a façade of humanity, and reveals itself through the unknown rather than always obviously in humans. Punctuated with moments of suffering accrued across striking scenes of still colours and the immersive soundtrack, Glazer has created one of the most unnerving films of the past decade that constantly reels you towards the true darkness of evil perpetrated routinely and blindly. Ultimately, at the end of Glazer’s film, the wave breaks, and one thing becomes certain – that, as Arendt also states, no one should have to want to “share the earth” with those driven by absolute and unfiltered evil.
The Zone of Interest can be seen in cinemas Australia wide from February 22nd 2024.
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY FILM INQUIRER 