The Zone of Interest
It sounds like acclaimed director Jonathan Glazer had the exact same thoughts while visiting Auschwitz, as he was particularly affected by the residence of the commandant Rudolf Höss (who was also Block leader in the similarly organized Dachau camp prior to his time in Auschwitz). The Höss residence (which still stands and currently has people living in it) is a luxurious villa with a backyard pool and garden, all bordered by a large wall in the corner of the camp. Glazer was inspired to work with the Auschwitz Museum and obtain permission to access their archives, examining testimonies provided by people who had been employed in the Höss household to put together an image of what life would have been like for the individuals that lived there.
Glazer eventually turned that research into "The Zone of Interest", one of the more uniquely chilling Holocaust dramas that you'll ever see. The movie serves as a kind of biopic of Höss (played by Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) as they try to build their dream lives with their family in the same gorgeous villa that borders Auschwitz. Glazer makes the decision not to show any violence or even anything at all from within the camp itself, but its presence is still felt in every frame. The large camp wall topped with barbed wire lurks in the background as the children play in the garden. The smoke and firelight from the crematoria linger through every window of the house. Most haunting is the movie's tremendous sound design, always there under every scene: the shuffling of boots, screamed commands of wardens, occassional blasts of gunfire, and periodic piercing screams never allow you forget exactly where you are. It's an extraordinary choice that lets the viewer's imagination create the horrifying images that never appear on the screen.
What the movie actually depicts are pretty mundane scenes of home life. Commandant Höss spends his time calmly giving orders to other officers, meeting with architects and other officials to discuss the layouts of camps around Germany and Poland, and quietly working at his desk. Hedwig is enamored with the house, seeing it as the perfect place to have the life they always dreamed of, where they can entertain family and friends, and give their children a spacious yard and garden to run and play in. She gossips with the other wives (smugly calling herself "The Queen of Auschwitz"), cruelly bosses her maids around, and gleefully accepts fine clothing that was taken from the Jewish women as they arrived at the camp. Glazer does not try and have us empathize with these people -- they are clearly monsters, casually accepting their surroundings and seeing their exalted status as something that is richly deserved.
The movie's focus on this kind of domestic tedium really serves to drive home the true evil of these people in a unique and profoundly upsetting way. Even as Höss and Hedwig ambitiously look to continue climbing up the Nazi hierarchy, other members of the Höss household start to be affected by the surrounding horror. Hedwig's visiting mother, initially impressed by all her daughter has achieved, eventually has to leave overnight without a word, clearly disturbed by the light of the fires. One of the children sneaks out at night and leaves food for the prisoners in a series of visually stunning scenes, filmed with a night vision effect. None of this even registers with Höss and Hedwig, completely oblivious to the world around them.
The movie is often staggeringly effective, although even at only 106 minutes, it may hit the same notes for a little too long. The family's blissful life is finally ended when Höss is promoted and must leave for another camp, while Hedwig refuses to leave her beautiful home and stays behind with the children. The movie's final scene is an interesting act of time travel that will certainly cause some debate, one of a few experimental flourishes that pepper the otherwise strictly formal narrative, mostly to great effect.
It's an unnerving portrait of the banality of evil, executed with precision and skill by a master at the top of his game. When you visit such places, as Glazer did and as I did earlier this year, one of the first questions you can't help but ask is, "did everyone around here know what was happening?" Glazer knows the answer: of course they did. Highlighting this fact by concentrating his attention on a single family that couldn't care less about what was happening around them ends up being just as (if not more) disturbing than any Holocaust movie made to date.
