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The Zone of Interest, a remarkable work of art, portrays the “banality of evil” (Arendt, 1963) with a subtle yet powerful intensity. Especially in the immersive experience of the big screen with loud sound, its intensity grips you in an overwhelming but hard-to-define sense of “subtle dread”, which I could pick up from my persistent nausea and a desperate wish to flee the cinema.
The film captures the viewer's emotional world without showing any disturbing images. It relies on the ordinary elements and normalcy of the characters, conveying this through nuances, comments, behaviours of everyday life, and above all, sensory elements.
The Zone of Interest is shot in an unusual but significant manner, with ten cameras distributed throughout the house where multiple actors play their parts and no director is present to direct. This makes viewers witness life inside and outside the Hösses' house as if they were part of the family, and the time clock had gone back 80 years. More importantly, in this way, the film takes a style that mimics the inner absence of an Ego to face the evil of genocide that is happening beyond the garden wall of the house, something that makes the film one of the most viscerally unsettling representations of the Holocaust and the question of complicity.
At the beginning: a long black screen only, and the sound of the natural environment—innocent birds singing. At the end: a long black screen and the powerful music by Mica Levi featuring what resembles a chorus of tormented souls.
It is 1943 and Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, resides with his wife, Hedwig, and their five children in a picturesque house close to the camp. The Höss family is brought up following the principles of the Artaman League, a German movement against urbanization that promoted a return to agrarian values and an appreciation for the environment.
The family relishes wholesome, serene picnics by the river and idyllic afternoons in the verdant, meticulous