Film: »My Rudi calls me the Queen of Auschwitz!«

At the beginning, Rudi has a picnic with the family by the river. The sun is shining. You splash around. He ponders, upper body free, sky in view. The two boys and the two girls are lovingly reprimanded. Then we head cross country over hill and dale back to our own home.

In the end, Rudi is alone and in uniform. At night he trudges down a large tiled stairwell, step by step. He vomits twice; discreetly and standing up. Between the two vomit stops there is a cut that jumps back in time by 80 years: you see a group of women with vacuum cleaners and cleaning cloths. They prepare exhibition rooms for visitors, wipe windows behind which countless shoes are lying on top of each other, and remove dust from the kilns of a crematorium.

Rudi, that’s what Mutzi, actually Hedwig, calls her husband, Rudolf, surname Höß. By profession he was commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943. Christian Friedel and Sandra Hülser play a German couple in the film “The Zone of Interest”: They sleep in the same room, but in separate beds. He only thinks about work; she directs the employees in the house and pedantically maintains the representative garden. They dutifully show affection to the children. And behind the walls of their bourgeois idyll, more than a million people are murdered.

“The Zone of Interest” is very loosely based on the novel of the same name by the British novelist Martin Amis, who died last year. His German parent company Hanser didn’t want the book; it was finally published by Kein & Aber in Austria. It was probably too sensitive for the Munich publisher to publish a text in which an SS man seduces Höß’ wife, whereupon the camp commandant commissioned Szmul, a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, to kill her.

The story of fraud and a Jewish protagonist are missing from Jonathan Glazer’s film. The director became known in the 90s with elaborate music videos, including for Radiohead and Massive Attack. So far he has made four feature films. In the last one, “Under the Skin” from 2013, Scarlett Johannson visits Earth as an alien and does not understand human society. He is, if you will, an expert on alienation in cold terms.

Glazer’s film is nominated for a whopping five Oscars. In Cannes he was awarded the Grand Jury Prize. The international press celebrated it as an artistic triumph. The British “Guardian” headlined: “Jonathan Glazer’s Auschwitz drama is a brutal masterpiece.”

“The Zone of Interest” is not so much shot from the perspective of the perpetrator, but rather builds perspectives on perpetrators. It’s about everyday life in horror, apathetic routines, the bunker of a nuclear family. The big task is to find images for the banality of evil. But the horror of the concentration camp is muted here in an artistically sophisticated way: we have to understand what we are not allowed to see and why that is right. A teenager said to his friends after the screening: “The outfits in the film were tough. The rest, not so much.”

The film is strictly framed. Cameraman Łukasz Żal works with a visual language that is reminiscent of video surveillance or hidden cameras. A claustrophobic confinement in the sparkling Höß house is created through angles that turn the viewer into an intruder. But anything indiscreet can hardly be observed. Voyeurs are not served.

There are no pictures from the camp. At night the chimneys smoke and you can see troops patrolling behind the gate of the family property. At one point, prisoners are chased through the fields while father and son Höß go on a horseback riding excursion. The atrocities are conveyed through the sound. You hear shots, screams, pleas, orders, but you don’t see any victims. The outside of the family idyll is a constant drone – a threat, and yet not a real one for the commander, the desk clerk.

The film is often credited with not engaging in suffering pornography. That’s correct. But by relying on the sound design, the suffering itself becomes, through a concrete aesthetic decision, an abstract horror, a ghastly background noise, distant evil. This need to hear is a torture, but you quickly understand what the film means by it, what it makes clear: ignorance, not wanting to see, keeps suffering in the world. Death screams and birdsong alternate.

In the first third of the film, two gentlemen from the Erfurt company Topf & Söhne come to visit. They build the crematoria for Auschwitz. The two are reminiscent of Vorwerk representatives when they praise the efficiency of their product and enjoy the technology of destruction over coffee and cake. The mass murder next door doesn’t bother us, it’s part of the business. The SS runes replace the city abbreviations as car license plates, are emblazoned as a logo on a sports top, and the swastika can only be seen a few times. So they actually become more of a nuisance than historical decor.

Death and crime invade this simulation of an ideal world in small scenes: the older Höß son plays in bed at night with gold teeth. On a second trip, Höß Senior fishes for a human skull bone, pulls the children home in the boat in the pouring rain and has them washed as thoroughly as possible. Hedwig’s mother can’t stand her visit to Auschwitz. She disappears overnight without a sound, leaving her daughter only a note that we don’t get to read. Hedwig then threatens a Polish housekeeper that her husband could turn her into ashes at any time.

Hülser plays a nightmarish German mother. She distributes clothes from dispossessed, murdered Jewish women in her household. Then she tries on a fur coat as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The commander locks all the doors in his house at night and turns off all the lights, as if he had to save money. Of course, in “The Zone of Interest” no sympathy is generated for the schizoid, apathetic Höß and his wife, who accepts living in a concentration camp in exchange for an exemplary house and wants to be the vanguard of German living in the new living space in the East. Friedel dismissively and plausibly plays a man who has never been able to see himself through the eyes of others; Huller is also a brilliant woman, for whom everything in the world that reminds her of something outside herself, of her own powerlessness, appears as dirt that can be destroyed.

»The Zone of Interest« is an experiment about, with and against the beautiful appearance, is a judicious use of cinematic means. You can understand how the camera, sound, acting, dialogue and script try to convey the cruel apathy with which it was possible to murder millions of people who were working themselves to death just a few minutes walk away. Höß’s childlike fascination with efficiency, Hedwig’s outbursts as a frustrated housewife, the stupid babbling, the monosyllables – all of this is petty-bourgeois, pathetic, murderous. Nevertheless, Glazer’s film does a favor to an audience that is happy to be content with this banality. Because it aestheticizes and presents the medium of film in a way that suggests: an adequate artistic answer to the question of the banality of evil has been found here.

“The Zone of Interest” is therefore a work that is successful in at least five categories and worthy of prizes in five categories. But this aesthetic sovereignty is also uncomfortable – a film that art lovers can praise in a controlled manner. Whether he will pursue his viewers remains questionable.

»Zone of Interest«, USA, UK, Poland 2023. Director and screenplay: Jonathan Glazer. With Christian Friedl, Sandra Hülser, Imogen Kogge. 106 min. In cinemas from today