Commemorating International Holocaust Day
Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant, Oscar nominated movie, The Zone of Interest, offers a chilling new perspective on the Holocaust.
Up for five Oscar Awards, including Best Picture, the film (in theaters nationwide Friday) is set outside the walls of Auschwitz at stately villa, where real-life Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) lives with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their five kids and a dog.
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“I hesitated to be a part of it because I didn’t dream of portraying a Nazi woman,” Hüller says. But speaking to director and co-writer Glazer, she was compelled by his “smart artistic choices,” depicting the subject matter in a way “I had never seen before.”
Glazer “was not interested in sensationalizing these atrocities,” says Johnnie Burn, an Oscar nominee for best sound. “It’s fundamental that everyone has their own understanding of what happened there. These mental images we all have are quite easy to reproduce through the suggestion of sound.”
Burn compiled 600 pages of research to ensure historical accuracy, detailing what times of day that transport trains arrived and executions of Jewish prisoners took place.
As Rudolf and Hedwig chat in bed, the dull roar of crematorium furnaces just outside their window is heard. At other times, it’s hard to place where exactly a dog’s barks or infant’s cries are coming from.
“That gives you that extraordinary feeling of, ‘I know you can close your eyes but you can’t close your ears, so how come you’re not hearing what I’m hearing?’” Burn says. “This ambient genocide pervading all their mundane worries and troubles is why the film works.”
For Hüller, it was important not to understand or humanize her icy matriarch, who boasts that she’s “the Queen of Auschwitz.”
“We wouldn’t research them too much, because we didn’t want to psychologize any behavior,” the German actress says. Shooting in Poland not far from the original camp, “we were very aware of what had taken place in this area at this period of time. But it was easy to let the characters forget it.”
Amid concerns about spa days and home improvements, Glazer drops in disturbing reminders of the Höss family’s indifference.
Hedwig tries on lipstick and a fur coat confiscated from the dead, while one of her sons collects gold teeth. In another stomach-churning scene, Rudolf furiously scrubs ash off his body after swimming in a nearby river, where he discovered human jawbone hours earlier.
Friedel’s biggest challenge was to give “this evil person a human face” through his “banal actions at home.” The film illustrates how many ordinary people felt emboldened by the Nazi party, willing to turn blind eye in exchange for wealth and power.
The real Höss was ultimately hanged for his war crimes in 1947.
“He thought he was a really important person, but he absolutely wasn’t,” Friedel says. “This is not only a movie about the Holocaust – it’s about our decisions, the darkness inside us and what we are capable of.”
