"The Zone of Interest" -- Movie Review
This Holocaust Parable caused a stir at the 2024 Oscars. Is it worth our time though?
Back in the mid 1980s, the massive Holocaust documentary Shoah depicted several astounding interviews with ordinary people who lived and worked nearby a WW2 concentration camp. In those interviews, you could tell they were cognizant of their P.R. problems with this subject matter. Were they complicit in monstrous crimes?
No, their answers suggested, they were ordinary people, unable to do much of anything to deter the massively armed German State from undertaking its death-camp operation. So they watched Jews being unloaded off train cars and pushed into camps, and then went about their lives.
This begs the question: how responsible is any member of a society for its society’s darkest sins?
Sometimes the answer is “not at all,” as when piratical states plunder their victims, attack foreign lands, and then extract monies from their subjects to do so (i.e., taxes). I believe that’s the situation that most of us find ourselves in.
Yet along comes 2023’s “The Zone of Interest” to implicate the 1930-40s German bourgeois, including housewives and children, in the Holocaust and more.
The movie depicts, extremely slowly and very quietly for the most part, a well-off German family living next to a concentration camp. You can see it sometimes in the background: barbed wires above a large wall. You can occasionally hear it, howls and screams during family dinner. Human smoke will rise above the wall. The beautiful shots in this movie, which are nearly all the shots, contrast strongly with such disturbing glimpses and barely audible sounds.
You’d be right to think that this is not the best piece of real estate for anybody this wealthy, even though the housewife says “we’re living like we dreamed we would.” Odds are, once that camp went up, their property values plummeted.
In that way, the movie is quite implausible, entering into parable or surrealist territory, although I have not looked up whether such Nazis actually lived this way.
The film’s surrealism is signaled by the title, “The Zone of Interest,” probably riffing on the “Zone” location in the famous Tarkovsky movie Stalker. It may even signal the general literary concept of “zone,” a deep and long-standing one in science fiction, often the symbol of a boundary between the material and immaterial, or between the possible and seemingly impossible (e.g., “The Twilight Zone”).
Here, the Zone of Interest’s “zone” is for the viewer to witness, the invisible barrier between a German family going about normie bougie life, and the atrocities happening just beyond their backyard.
Arguably, we viewers are the zone. Will we relish in the luxury lifestyle of the family, or will we be sufficiently moved by the occasional screams to feel for and denounce the nearby atrocities?
We sense this tension within five minutes, and I must admit that it turned into a bit of a gimmick, in a way that Shoah certainly is not. Once we realize the main point is the impossible tension between ignorance/ignoring and awareness, well, then we are asked to sit with it for 100 more minutes. Artful movies don’t often have one point – they often have a seemingly infinite numbers of points, often in great tension with each other -- yet I think this one sorta does have one point, as some ideologically-driven parables do.
That this movie is a gimmick, unfortunately, has been perpetuated by the director. Jonathan Glazer, at the 2024 Oscars, compared his Nazi movie to the “dehumanization” happening right now. He mentioned Israel and Gaza as one example of that.
I don’t expect artists to be rigorously philosophical, yet this time Mr. Glazer has little to no excuse. His comments could be easily construed as an “ad Hitlerum” argument, and he’s interpreting his own work as a Godwin’s Law picture. Thankfully, as all artists are, he’s just an interpreter.
We could ask the question following Glazer’s prompting: at what point would we be complicit in dehumanization nearby us?
Well, first, Mr. Glazer’s comments are about events halfway around the world, for those of us in the U.S. and the U.K, where he’s from.
This seems to me to be typical liberal abstractionism, the kind that Charles Dickens condemned evangelicals for via his character of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. Jellyby cares too much about orphans in Africa, but not the English street urchins on her own street, and even the wellbeing of her own children. That’s political abstraction: worry about everything far away and overseas somewhere, and yet do little to nothing at the local level that you can participate in. Abstract problems beyond the human scale take up your time and mental energy; concrete problems at the human scale go ignored.
Taking the scenario in this film as a comment on modern living, let’s say I live next to a dangerous U.S. highway, for they are all dangerous, as there are over six million car accidents each year. Am I complicit in the destruction and slaughter on the roads?
Maybe, if ignoring dehumanization today is the point!
The near-equivalent of the entire Vietnam-War death total happens every year on US highways – tens of thousands dead, year after year. You are most likely to killed in a car accident before middle-age than to be killed by anything else.
And here I am, living right near a dangerous highway, hearing those horrifying sounds of screeching metallic destruction, every single day.
Okay, just playing, dear reader! I don’t know who would say that I, Joe Sixpack, bougie bro galore, am responsible for such a site of slaughter.
Is that because this issue is almost completely ignored, or because it’s unreasonable to blame a person in such a situation for this problem?
At what point would a neighbor to an atrocity need to act or intervene?
We can’t get an answer from “The Zone of Interest” at all. It’s supposed to seem obvious to a modern audience that we need to feel badly. Then, following Glazer, we are also supposed to examine ourselves for what atrocities we are ignoring and should feel for.
But of course the movie’s moral scale is orders of magnitude beyond my hypothetical highway scenario, beyond anything that almost all of us have lived through.
Even if I were one of the people in the film, I don’t know what I could do anyway, for the movie does not offer solutions. Move away? That seems lame. They would probably make an arthouse movie calling me a coward for fleeing anyway. So what would Mr. Glazer have me do?
Going Rambo ain’t an option. It’s the German war machine that such a moral Rambo would take on. To date, Mr. Glazer has not enlisted in either a military organization or a peace-keeping operation, so I assume he would agree with this.
Obviously, Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews, a start for sure, as depicted in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Many Germans did hide Jews and rebelled in their own ways, even planning to assassinate Hitler. They are not depicted in ‘The Zone of Interest.”
Honestly, dear reader, maybe I just grade too many undergrad papers with terrible analogies. Maybe I am overly sensitive to what I consider false arguments by analogy, the kind Mr. Glazer seemed to make in his Oscar speech.
I can see “Zone of Interest” as a comment on 1940s Germany. Okay, fine. It’s beautiful and really slow, with little character development or anything else a traditional narrative might have.
But if “Zone of Interest” is about today’s world, no, I could not in good conscious go there.
And that’s because I don’t think you should be blamed for the massive abstract problems you live far away from and can do little to nothing about. Maybe stop voting for terrible politicians who are really pirates, plunderers, and warmongers. In my view, that’s nearly all of them. But still, I don’t blame you!
Yes, if a concentration camp is erected next to your house, I would suggest moving. That might be the greatest and only actionable lesson of “The Zone of Interest.”
This is the most grounded review I have read of this film, which I haven't watched. Thank you, Josh!
I hate to criticise a grader of analogies :-) but I think your highway analogy misses the point. The family in question was benefiting materially from being located next to the camp. Not only did they have power and respect from his job in the camp which provided them with the house of their dreams, but they also were receiving clothes (including the fur coat!) and jewelry taken from the inmates. In order for your analogy to work you would have to move next to the highway to get a job overseeing the cleaning up of car crashes while taking clothes and jewels from the dead.
I viewed the "Zone" of Interest more geographically. I saw it as being an analogy for nation states benefiting from the repression and oppression of others. Maybe this explains Glazers comments at the Oscars?