If we could see a hundred years into the future, what would we think of the choices we make today? Decisions made in the moment always seem like the best possible solution at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, those same actions can often appear to be quite garish and chilling.

But I’m really talking about everyday decisions. Maybe the choice to hold money instead of giving it, throwing food away rather than donating it, buying single-use plastic instead of a reusable vessel you have to clean—the ordinary, everyday concessions one makes to keep moving forward, to maintain comfort. But what if those everyday concessions amounted to one of the most heinous acts of the 20th century?

Written for the screen and directed by Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest follows a German S.S. officer’s family during the height of World War II. The family lives comfortably on a large estate next door to Auschwitz. All day, every day, you can hear the ovens in the background, a few distant gunshots, and a bloodcurdling scream now and then. Thousands of Jews and Romas and anything the Reich deems “undesirable” are being starved, worked, abused, and burned alive while this family eats, sleeps, and discusses everyday matters. How cruel and cold can they be? How cruel and cold are we, sitting in the audience while similar atrocities continue to happen all over the world? Not all of them are next door, but a few are. Are we also growing vines to cover the privacy wall separating our beautiful abode from a highly efficient mass-killing device?

Based on the novel by Martin Amis, Zone of Interest takes cinema’s ability to identify and empathize and pushes it to the brink. Glazer makes no concessions and offers his characters no redemption. When Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) learns he will be in charge of Hitler’s Hungarian deportation and slaughter, he phones his wife (Sandra Hüller) to let her know the good news: The operation will be carried out using her family name. She seems pleased with this information and then asks what dignitaries were at the party. He wasn’t paying attention, he admits. He was too busy imagining how he would gas all the partygoers in a room with such high ceilings.

What do you do with such an admission? Is Höss a murderous madman who could kill his fellow officers as easily as he murders the trapped Jews next door? Probably not. He’s a scientist, a thinker, someone tasked with a problem he’s always trying to solve or improve. We never see him kill anyone or anything, never even utter an order. And yet the blood on his hands is thick. Complicity can be rough.

But all of this killing, all this constant murder and genocide, has to amount to something, right? And so, as Höss descends the staircase from the party, he begins to retch. His body betrays him, and he dry heaves painfully, the hard marble floors echoing his sin. I wonder what he was thinking about when his stomach turned on him and tried to wring him out like a dirty rag.

This moment is reminiscent of another: 2012’s The Act of Killing. In that one, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer confronts the men responsible for the Indonesian mass killing of the mid-1960s and has them restage the murders for the camera. The men—who were never convicted of a crime—comply. Their participation is enthusiastic and unconcerned by the consequences until one of the killers, Anwar Congo, begins to retch and dry heave. He, too, produces an unholy sound as if the body is trying to vomit up all the painful memories it no longer wants to carry.

The Zone of Interest is not as compelling as The Act of Killing, but it is a chilling tale well told with a haunting effect—due, in part, to Mica Levy’s magnificent score. I wonder if Höss can hear that score building in his brain as he looks into the future and sees the judgment that awaits him. I wonder what he sees. I also wonder: What will the future think of me?

The Zone of Interest (2023)
Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer
Based on the novel by Martin Amis
Produced by Ewa Puszczynska, James Wilson
Starring: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Max Beck, Ralf Zillmann
A24, Rated PG-13, Running time 105 minutes, Premiered May 19, 2023 at the Cannes Film Festival

---