Why ‘The Zone of Interest’ is insipid fiction

The Holocaust drama won an Oscar last week. M K Raghavendra looks at the challenges of fictionalising persecution.

Contemporary cinema is occupied with the Holocaust because of the horror associated with it. The best-known film dealing with the subject was Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ (1993) but, regardless of the eulogies heaped upon it, the film was problematic because of its tendency to sensationalise. Stanley Kubrick noted that the Holocaust was not about the heroism of one man who saved a thousand people but about the failure of human civilisation to have allowed around six million people to be methodically exterminated in the matter of a few years. 

There are other ways of dealing with the subject and Jean-Luc Godard suggested that a ‘true’ perspective on the Holocaust (because of the industrial methods employed) might be that of an accountant at Auschwitz trying conscientiously to keep watch over the everyday expenditure. Withholding the horror, Godard seems to suggest, might be a better way to deal with something so widely portrayed since there is the danger of audiences becoming insensitive to the subject. Among the films that attempt understatement in this way are Andrej Munk’s ‘The Passenger’ (1963) and Andrei Konchalovsky’s ‘Paradise’ (2016); the latter film adopted the perspective of an aristocratic SS officer sent to audit a concentration camp because of the suspected corruption in it. Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ (2023), which has just won the Oscar for the best international film, tells, similarly, a story about the family life of Rudolf Hoess, who was commandant at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the extermination camps.

In Jonathan Glazer’s film, the Hoess family (Rudolf, his wife Hedwig and their five children) is trying to live an idyllic life in a lavish bungalow with a beautiful garden that abuts the death camp. The strategy from the very first frame is to deal visually with its lushness while having constant sounds from the camp intrude — gun shots, shouts, screams and crying children. A technical problem the camp has to deal with pertains to the cremations, how so many dead people can be cremated to keep pace with the output of the gas chambers. Smoke from the ovens is constantly seen from the bungalow but the members of the family treat it as routine and the children grow up in this atmosphere, as if that were nothing. At night we see a child in bed studying the extracted gold teeth from one of the dead inmates. Since we already know what the film is attempting from the advance publicity, we expect no drama in the story: it is unseen and happening entirely on the other side of the wall. The only ‘excitement’ allowed into the story of the Hoess family’s existence is Rudolf transferred briefly elsewhere until he is brought back — since his replacement cannot manage the expected large contingent of Hungarian Jews.     

The ‘Zone of Interest’ may seem like audacious filmmaking but there is something curiously insipid about it. The reason, one initially supposes, is the unacceptability of the notion that one can live in such an atmosphere of evil and not be affected by it, especially the children who seem to lead otherwise ‘innocent’ lives. Would there not be moral contamination of some sort? This is evidently something uncertain since we cannot know how ‘moral contamination’ would proceed. 

But I think the basic problem is much deeper — in the construction of the fiction itself. The film may be dealing with actual, documented people but it is constructing fiction around their everyday life in the vicinity of a Nazi extermination camp. I propose that the subjects of fiction must necessarily follow a trajectory, being changed by what they undergo and the protagonists are not allowed to transform. I suggested earlier that the drama ‘happened on the other side of the wall’ and that is not strictly true since the cries and the gunshots do not constitute the kind of ‘drama’ that fiction demands, where we must be made to care for/about those it is about; their lives must be made interesting. Formal/visual devices cannot compensate for the lack.

The ‘Zone of Interest’ cannot evidently ‘care about’ the protagonists because of what they are culpable of, but the peripheral sounds and smoke are not enough to make us care about their victims either. As if recognising this, the film includes a flash-forward showing us the Holocaust exhibits at Auschwitz today, mainly the quantities of worn footwear belonging to the dead inmates preserved behind transparent glass; but this strategy is also hardly effective. The film is not telling anything that we do not already know and have not been duly prepared for. 

The non-admission of change and drama in the lives and attitudes of the protagonists is the drawback noted in ‘The Zone of Interest’. I will conclude this piece with speculation about why fiction demands it. Fiction is essentially an attempt to construct a universe understandable to humankind since ‘God’s world’ cannot be known — as we might like it to be. Since literature/fiction is social in its purpose, it needs to have an ethical or moral component and the possibility that humankind can transform for the better — or suffer for not transforming — is an essential part of it. Even a pessimistic tale would imply what should be, but is not. When Glazer’s film shows us something as horrific about humanity as the Holocaust without caring much about/for those involved, it relies on the tears already shed over the chapter to propel its fiction. And for all the care taken to recreate the past, it has no moral vision to offer. 

(The author is a well-known film critic)