Honestly, walking out of a screening of The Zone of Interest, you don't feel like you’ve just watched a "movie" in the traditional sense. It’s more like you’ve been standing in a room where something horrific is happening just behind the wallpaper, and no matter how hard you scrub, you can’t get the sound out of your ears. Jonathan Glazer didn’t make a historical drama. He made a horror movie about the mundane nature of evil, and it’s probably the most unsettling thing put on film in the last decade.
The premise is deceptively simple. We follow Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. They live in a beautiful house. There are gardens. There are sunflowers. There is a pool with a slide for the kids.
But there is also a wall.
On the other side of that wall is the machinery of the Holocaust. We never see it. Not once. We see the smoke from the chimneys. We hear the muffled screams, the gunshots, and the constant, low-frequency hum of the crematoria. Glazer’s decision to keep the violence off-screen is what makes The Zone of Interest so uniquely devastating. It forces your brain to fill in the gaps, which is always worse than seeing the "real" thing.
The Sound of The Zone of Interest is Doing All the Heavy Lifting
If you watch this movie on a laptop with crappy speakers, you are missing 70% of the experience. Sound designer Johnnie Burn spent years researching what Auschwitz actually sounded like. He didn't just guess. He looked at historical records, witness testimonies, and the distance between the Höss house and the camp.
The result? A soundscape that feels like a physical weight.
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You’ll be watching Hedwig (played with a chilling, vacant pride by Sandra Hüller) talk about her "Paradise Garden," and in the background, there’s this rhythmic thud-thud-thud. It’s the sound of the camp operating. It never stops. It becomes a texture. This is what Glazer calls "Ambient Evil." It’s the idea that these people weren't just "doing their jobs"—they had successfully tuned out the sound of mass murder to the point where it was just background noise, like a refrigerator humming or a distant lawnmower.
Why the "Big Brother" Filming Style Works
Glazer used a multi-camera setup that looked more like a reality TV show than a Hollywood production. He hid up to ten cameras around the house and garden. The actors were often alone in the house with no visible crew, no boom mics, and no lighting rigs.
This allowed Christian Friedel (Rudolf) and Sandra Hüller to just exist.
They aren't "acting" for the camera in the way we're used to. They’re just eating breakfast. They’re arguing about a potential job transfer. They’re trying on clothes. Because the camera is a static, unblinking observer, the movie feels voyeuristic. You feel like a ghost haunting their house, watching a family live their best life while a few meters away, the world is ending. It’s a technique that strips away the melodrama. There are no swelling violins to tell you how to feel. There are no hero moments. There is just the banality of a man who worries about his promotion while he designs more efficient ways to kill people.
The Real-Life Figures Behind the Horror
It’s easy to forget that Rudolf and Hedwig Höss were real people. They really lived in that house. They really had five children who played in that garden. Rudolf Höss was one of the longest-serving commandants at Auschwitz, and his "efficiency" in managing the camp was what made him a rising star in the Nazi hierarchy.
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- Rudolf Höss: He was eventually captured, tried, and hanged in 1947—right next to the crematorium at Auschwitz.
- Hedwig Höss: She famously referred to herself as the "Queen of Auschwitz." She loved her life there. She had prisoners working as her servants. When Rudolf was told he was being transferred, her main concern wasn't the morality of his work; it was that she didn't want to leave her beautiful home.
The movie captures this specific brand of selfishness perfectly. Hedwig isn't a mustache-twirling villain. She’s just a woman who wants a nice garden and is willing to ignore a genocide to keep it. That’s the "Zone of Interest" (Interessengebiet)—the 40-square-kilometer area surrounding the Auschwitz complex. It was a restricted zone, but for the Höss family, it was a sanctuary.
That Ending Explained (Sorta)
People have been arguing about the final sequence of The Zone of Interest since it premiered at Cannes. Without spoiling the exact visual, there is a sudden, jarring jump in time.
It breaks the "reality" of the film.
Suddenly, we are confronted with the legacy of what Höss built. We see the modern-day Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. We see the piles of shoes. We see the gas chambers. But we see them through the eyes of the people who work there now—the janitors and cleaners who are just doing their jobs, vacuuming the floors and cleaning the glass.
It’s a direct parallel to the Höss family. Even today, the site of the greatest atrocity in human history is a workplace. Life goes on. Maintenance happens. The "machinery" just looks different now. It forces the audience to ask: How much do we tune out today? What "walls" have we built around our own comfortable lives to avoid looking at the suffering that sustains them?
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What Most People Get Wrong About the Film
Some critics have called the film "cold" or "experimental." That’s a bit of a misunderstanding. It’s not experimental for the sake of being weird; it’s experimental because the traditional way of telling Holocaust stories—the "Schindler’s List" approach—has become almost too familiar. We know how to react to a cinematic tragedy. We know when to cry.
The Zone of Interest refuses to give you that catharsis.
It doesn't let you feel "good" for being sad. Instead, it makes you feel complicit. By focusing on the perpetrators rather than the victims, it avoids the "trauma porn" trap. We don't see the prisoners' faces because the Höss family didn't see them as people. They were just "the other side of the wall." By forcing the audience to stay on the Nazi side of the fence, Glazer makes us realize how easy it is for human beings to compartmentalize horror.
Actionable Takeaways for Your Next Watch
If you haven't seen it yet, or if you're planning a second viewing, keep these things in mind to get the most out of the experience:
- Wear Headphones: If you aren't in a theater with Dolby Atmos, use high-quality over-ear headphones. The sound is the movie. Listen for the dogs, the motorcycles, and the distant shouting.
- Watch the Background: Don't just look at the actors. Look at the steam in the distance. Look at the ash being spread on the garden soil. The movie tells its true story in the periphery.
- Research the "Thermal" Scenes: There are a few sequences shot with thermal imaging cameras. These scenes follow a local Polish girl who is hiding food for the prisoners at night. These were based on a real person Glazer met, an old woman who had been part of the Polish resistance as a child. These scenes represent the only "light" in the film, which is why they look so visually distinct.
- Don't Expect a Plot: This isn't a movie where "things happen" in a traditional arc. It’s a character study of a void. If you go in expecting a thriller, you'll be disappointed. Go in expecting an installation piece.
The Zone of Interest isn't an easy watch, and it shouldn't be. It’s a film that demands you stay uncomfortable. It’s about the fact that the people who committed these acts weren't monsters from another planet. They were people who liked their gardens, loved their kids, and just happened to be okay with mass murder if it meant they got to live in a nice house. That is the most terrifying realization of all.
To fully grasp the historical context, you might want to look into the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, which he wrote while awaiting execution. They are a chilling look into the mind of a man who viewed the logistics of death as a mere administrative challenge. Reading those alongside a viewing of the film provides a hauntingly complete picture of the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt famously described. After watching, the best thing to do is sit in the silence for a moment—it's the only way to process what Glazer has actually done here.