"The Zone of Interest" Challenges the Language of Cinema

Johnathan Glazer rejects the conventions of narrative to reveal a nauseating banality

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. 

The power of Holocaust cinema resides in the absence of atrocity. The ability to create and manipulate an image is a corrupting power; a technique in the language of cinema that was written in the shadow of fascism. Because of the constant prevalence of this shadow, filmmakers like Alan Renais and Claude Lanzmann construct their films in an absence of atrocity. In Renais’ Night and Fog, the only footage he creates himself is that of Auschwitz ten years after its liberation, supplementing these still and lifeless shots with documentary footage from the war. Lanzmann’s Shoah rejects images of the Holocaust entirely, and demands that bearing witness depends on listening, rather than trying to gather the images of an atrocity into something suitable for the eye.

The Zone of Interest surrenders itself to this absence. It builds an idyllic home of the Auschwitz commandant and plays the mundanity of modern life while a genocide is carried out in the background. We are never privy to the slaughter but made constantly aware of it -- orange smoke billows over the garden walls, screams and gunshots punctuate conversation, bones and ash float down the river where children sunbathe. Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz never occupy a single frame -- they only exist because we know them to.

Through the intentional subversion and ultimate rejection of familiar cinematic language, and the absence of visual confirmation of the horrors beyond the commandant’s garden walls, director Johnathan Glazer resists the conventions of storytelling to implicate us all as potential or actual partners in a landscape where the banality of evil is as integral and common as garden flowers. The haunting sparseness of the film evokes nausea, but only because of the deliberate absence of atrocity in a space where we know it exists. The Zone of Interest lies in the shadow of suffering, but only shows us the people who carry it out, rigidly enamored of their normal family life while breathing the ashes of the people they are eradicating. 

By rejecting the conventions of narrative storytelling, The Zone of Interest is anti-cinema. It reduces the grammar of filmmaking and storytelling to the mundane motions of a machine. The history of Nazism has become blank and standard, a banal reality, as have the cinematic tools that were constructed to valorize this same history. The Zone of Interest exists in direct contrast to films like Schindler’s List and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which use these tools to abuse the stories they claim to commemorate, creating glossy cinematizations that twist and manipulate emotion. 

In the final scene of The Zone of Interest, the commandant appears to look forward into history and sees modern day maintenance workers cleaning and polishing the machines of Auschwitz, blankly waxing the floors as a pile of discarded suitcases looms above them. The banality is reproduced, and the commandant’s story has been folded into history. Now, visitors can arrive at Auschwitz by choice, but this election to bear witness is no guarantee of an end to evil's continuing failure to recognize itself. The ability to enact annihilation is as dependent on hatred as it is on thoughtlessness -- a numb and silent complicity, entirely unflinching. 

OVERALL SCORE: 10/10

Update: The Zone of Interest now places at #3 on my Best of 2023 list.

The Zone of Interest was released on December 15, 2023, and is currently in US theaters.