It’ll haunt you forever: The Zone of Interest reviewed

I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing, but I’m certainly always bracing myself for the latest Holocaust film. There have been some horribly dim ones, such as The Reader or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, both of which invite you to sympathise with the perpetrators and you know what? I won’t if it’s all the same to you. (Don’t get me started on Schindler’s List; we’ll be here forever.) But Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest dispenses with the usual conventions. There is no humanising or even dehumanising. There is no pretence at insight. It was what it was; look at how ordinary these mass murderers were. Treated like this, it’s somehow more horrifying and terrifying than Nazis stomping all over the place being evil. It’s extraordinary, powerful, and will haunt you today, tomorrow, and maybe for all your days to come.

The starting point for Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin) was Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, as well as his own visit to the gas chambers where he noted that the family home of Rudolf Höss – Auschwitz’s commandant – was so near to the death camp that the two places even shared a wall. Life one side, genocide the other. Nice. How could a family live like this? Easily, it turns out.

The film opens with Mica Levi’s dread-laden score and a black nothingness, and then bright sunshine as we join Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their brood of blonde, healthy children picnicking by a lake. The water sparkles. They splash in the shallows and hunt for wild strawberries. Birds chirp. It’s idyllic. Eventually they make their way home and then it’s the next morning with Rudolf coming down in his SS uniform.