Graphic by Hale Whitney ‘26.
Max Rhoads ’25
Opinion Section Editor
Content warning: This article mentions genocide and mass murder.
This story also contains spoilers for the film “The Zone of Interest.”
Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film “The Zone of Interest” tells a rather unconventional story of the Holocaust, and in so doing warns viewers not to be complacent.
The film is framed from the perspective of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who live on the outskirts of one of the most notorious death camps in history. The viewer is greeted with scenes of peaceful domesticity, made gut-churning by the outside context and Johnnie Burn’s unsettling, dissonant soundscape.
This uneasy peace is directly juxtaposed with the violence outside their sphere: sounds of screaming and gunshots are heard while the family sleeps; a family swimming trip is quickly marred by the discovery of human remains in the water; the oldest son looks at gold teeth with a flashlight under the covers.
While the film mainly focuses on the Höss family, it is also interspersed with scenes of an unnamed Polish girl who sneaks food into the camp. Up until the end, her scenes are shot with a night-vision camera, and we never see her face. It is such a small act, but it puts her in grave danger and speaks to her extraordinary kindness and courage.
The Höss family is well aware of what is occurring quite literally in their backyard, and it is not incidental to their comfortable lifestyle; in fact, it is what allows them to live this way. The wife regularly receives clothing seized from prisoners in the camp and makes lighthearted jokes about it. In the middle of the film, she says to her husband, “We are living the way the Führer wants.”
The film exemplifies Holocaust survivor and scholar Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil.” Arendt theorizes that because the Holocaust was legal within Germany and there were systems in place that allowed it to happen, for most German citizens, the mass death became the background noise to their daily lives.
The Höss family has so thoroughly convinced themselves that not only is their lifestyle worth perpetuating the violence and brutality, but that the brutality is a good thing because it is happening to people who do not matter to them and whom they do not see as human. They are not cartoon villains; they are people with full lives like us, which makes it all the more scary.
The final scene splits between Rudolf Höss in 1943 and a sequence filmed at the Auschwitz museum in the present day. It is mostly silent save for the sounds of the workers cleaning the display cases of shoes, glasses, and other property seized from prisoners. The present-day sequence ends and returns to 1943, Höss stares down the hall, then descends the stairs. There is no justice in this film. The perpetrators are not punished.
“The Zone of Interest” is well-written, well-executed, and clear in its message. With this film, Glazer makes a commentary on human behavior and invites us as the viewers to look inward. We can be like the Höss family and the average German citizens of the time and ignore the oppressive systems that keep us comfortable, or we can be like the Polish girl and give back.