Screens/Reviews

The Zone of Interest
Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 105 mins.
When: Fri., Dec. 22
Genre: Drama
Rating: NNNNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Powerful film shows how easily even holocaust horrors can be normalized by the oppressors.

LIKELY CONTENDER for this year’s Best Film Oscar and certain winner of Best International Feature Film, The Zone of Interest is a masterful movie that, with brilliance and restraint, explores the everyday life of a German family during the Second World War. The family lives next to Auschwitz, the concentration camp the family patriarch commands.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin), who also co-wrote the film, is understated in his approach. The normalcy with which the comandante Rudolph Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his family go about their routine lives as people — Jewish, Romani, and others Nazis deemed undesirable — are murdered daily just steps from their carefully maintained home is the horror revealed in this film.

The atrocities being committed on the other side of the wall that separates the family from the hell their patriarch administers are only hinted at, though viewers never escape the dread.

Matter-of-fact moments, like watching the women of the house go through freshly arrived hand-me-downs around the kitchen table are re-cast when viewers realize they are the belongings of murdered prisoners.

Occasional shouts and muffled shots from the camp are heard buried in the soundtrack background, but concerns about the husband’s job prospects, getting the kids to school on time and maintaining the massive home garden dominate the family’s worries.

The only time a family member seems to ponder the camp’s inmates is to cruelly consider whether a disliked Jewish neighbour might be interred there. All so cold, uncaring and casual, the normalcy with which a community can grow accustomed to genocide is the inescapable nightmare of The Zone of Interest.

As we watch bodies pile up since October 7 and the internet challenges, “If you are wondering what you would do during a holocaust, you’re doing it right now,” The Zone of Interest underlines how it’s possible to do nothing while a holocaust takes place.

Then and now the question is: what would you do? The Zone of Interest is a film that needs to be seen. It is powerful filmmaking with a timeless message about responsibility and how horrible brutality is sometimes accomplished through massive acts of destruction — sometimes simply through quiet compliance and obedience.