My review of The Zone Of Interest:

I was shook by this film. I’m still shook now, a few hours after walking out of the theater.

I’m remembering a made-for-TV movie in 2000, also Holocaust-related, about the first Nuremberg trials starring Alec Baldwin. The great character actor Matt Craven plays real-life American psychologist Gustav Gilbert, and at one point in the movie, based off Gustav’s own notes, Craven delivers the coup de grace regarding his conversations with Nazi war criminals:

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think i’ve found it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants - a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

This understanding kept echoing in my head as I watched Zone Of Interest. It’s such a given, such a foregone conclusion for the acts of utter depravity; yet we’re rarely put face to face with the truth of what that looks like.

I remember seeing Schindler’s List in theaters. I was 19. There was a lot of honesty in its depictions. The parts that upset me the most were the casualness and business-like manner by which the Nazis were shown carrying out their acts.

Some years later I saw HBO’s “Conspiracy”, a dramatized recreation of the Wannsee Conference. The same sort of casualness and lack of empathy of a table of Nazis discussing the finer points of “marriage deferrment” from selection for the trains was just as chilling.

Schindler’s List… it’s Nazis acting out orders. Conspiracy… it’s Nazis conducting cold business.

Zone Of Interest distinguishes itself from these previous films. It’s not showing orders, or business. It’s banality. Glazer’s directing, the absolute magnificent sound design, Levi’s score, they all played a role in my discomfort. But what made me most unsettled was that banality of evil.

Maybe this was the last thing; the last terrible truth to look straight into the eye about Nazi Germany, or indeed any murdering oppressor. It’s often historically necessary to focus on criminals’ murderous acts, or cruel, ruthless machinations or plans. We don’t often get to see the other part. The way trivial life continues. I think it’s the worst part. It seems to be the very bottom of human cruelty to sustain a normal existence for oneself while causing immeasurable suffering. More than any other image or depiction, it provides the evidence that this is possible, that we are capable of it. Zone Of Interest invites you to see this banality play out, day by day, the subjects unreservedly unaware of the juxtaposition. I think of the dog; the bouncing, bouyant black labrador that galavants through the house and the garden throughout. He’s the only witness. But he only witnesses his beloved masters. That’s all he knows.

The triteness of the action we see on screen is thematically matched with the triteness the characters considered the work of the camps. It scarcely crosses their minds. It’s as inconsequential as an annoying fly, except when the effluvia of the work bothers someone’s lungs or swimming hole.

Not a single frame of violence or suffering is shown. It wouldn’t have mattered: I long ago desentisized myself to cinematic depictions of violence, blood, gore, suffering, etc. What I never desensitized to was the lack of empathy. It may be the prevailing constant that grants me the belief that I’m a good person. I can’t desensitize to a lack of empathy, and they certainly did.

I thoguht of Haneke’s “The White Ribbon.” There are some parallels. I won’t discuss them here.

Nor will I discuss the final scenes, which are open to interpretation as to how they’re edited. Your interpretation is as good as mine.

The film is slow; it plays - for lack of a better term - like an “art house” film, and that may turn off some viewers. It’s a pity, because it’s rare to see a film with this kind of honesty. If you can, see it. It will haunt you for some time, as it haunts me. It’s the themes I keep coming back to. The absence of empathy. The banality of evil.

“ It seems to be the very bottom of human cruelty to sustain a normal existence for oneself while causing immeasurable suffering.”

And yet…it’s horrifyingly common, and many people participate in systems of immeasurable suffering at various levels—some obviously much lower than that of an Auschwitz commandant—all the time.

Blood diamonds were commonly available at pretty much every mall in America until the proliferation of lab-grown diamonds broke the back of the De Beers cartel. In 1937, George Orwell wrote “…in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.” America has put itself in a similar—in fact, worse—moral position by continuing to be joined at the hip to China as a trading partner even as God knows how many Uighurs succumb to genocide, and the ubiquity of Chinese-made products in the US makes boycotting virtually impossible for the average consumer. https://leave-russia.org/ maintains a blacklist of companies that continue to do business with the country that brought you the Ukraine War, the assassination of Alexei Navalny, and a tightening noose of dangerous homophobia; those companies include Pepsi, Nestle, and Mondelez (the makers of Oreos), among thousands of others.

Meanwhile, I read comments online from people who say things like “I don’t watch the news because it’s too depressing and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.”

When it comes to not only the banality of evil, but also complicity and willful blindness, we never seem to learn.

As an aside, Conspiracy was excellent and the acting in it was top-notch. Who’da thunk that Bert Large from Doc Martin could be so sinister?!

Edit: looking this over I really, really hope I didn’t come across as trivializing the Holocaust. My point is this: everybody says “never again,” but how many people exhibit the fortitude, strength of conscience, and refusal to give in to apathy that are needed to really live by “never again”? Let’s all try harder at it.

Strong points. It takes work, and effort, and maybe something else - a communal will - to walk away from Omelas for good. But as in the story, it can start with just a few.

Amen! Like Mr. Rogers used to say, “Always look for the helpers. There are always people who are helping.” And maybe one person can become more of a helper than they think—and then recruit more helpers!

Excellent review.

I've seen the film now and read the review. I agree. Beautiful review that captured the film perfectly.

I'm afraid to read it since it says 'may contain spoilers'.

It makes you wonder what is being spoiled.

I got some from before it was marked for spoilers...but hey.

I don't think you can "spoil" this film in the traditional sense because it doesn't really have a plot. Nothing in Robert's review "gives away" anything because the film is all about tone instead of plot.

After the opening logos, you get a black screen (in a 16X9 aspect ratio) with the title of the film in relatively small, white letters. Then over the course of the next several minutes the white title fades to black while haunting ethereal plays until you're left with a black screen for another couple of minutes.

I think this is the director's way of instructing us to not pay attention to the visuals as much as the sounds. The family members go about their daily mundane tasks while we hear the horrors of what's going on in the background.

Ladies having discussions about landscaping in the foreground while in the background we hear gunshots and screaming, which the ladies seem to be completely oblivious to.

And the music over the closing credits is staggering. Think of the vocal music at the beginning of "2001: A Space Odyssey" but even more disturbing,

The camera doesn't have an opinion of what's going on. It's just observing, as are we.

So don't walk into this movie expecting to see "what happens" or be led into thinking you know what plot-driving element is going to occur next. That's not what this film is.

Have you seen it yet? I'm going to see it tomorrow.

Not yet. My local Arthouse Theater has been closed since 2021, but is supposed to be reopened any day now. Fingers crossed.

It's also streaming now

"Banality of evil" implies that people like Hoess or Eichmann were just middle-management drones. That isn't correct. What Zone of Interest reminds us of is that the Nazis thought they were the good guys, who were ridding the world of evil so that virtuous, deserving people like themselves and their children could enjoy the future of safety and happiness that they deserved. As Himmler told the assembled SS leadership in his 1943 Posen Speech, they were doing dirty but essential work for the well being of the German people. Hoess was a corporate careerist, and his wife a corporate wife but he had volunteered for the SS years before Hitler took power because he believed in what the Nazis wanted to accomplish.

What you are saying is not in any way inconsistent with the way "banality of evil" is used in the book.

I think both would-be heroes and thoughtless middle-management drones existed among the ranks of Nazis (and also outright sadists like Mengele). I’ve come to the conclusion that fascist regimes attract different people for different reasons.

Edit: I realize that what I meant was “wannabe heroes.”

I think the phrase was coined for Eichmann, not Hoess.

Yes, it was, but it is automatically and unthinkingly applied to all of the middle management types that the Germans call Schreibtischmorder, desk murderers. Eichman was only a Lieutenant Colonel, and Hoess one grade lower as a Major, but they were both early recruits to the SS who believed in what they were doing.

Wow.
I saw this in Austria. It was full of 20-somethings, hundreds showed up for this screening tonight.

This movie is a service. When I read about how few American students even know what the Holocaust is, it made me reconsider my opinion that these sorts of movies have been made too many times. Nobody has made anything like the Zone of Interest.

The reaction from the audience was powerful. Silence through the credits and through the end music. Nobody moved. Seeing as Austria was a centerpiece of this history, I can guess why many young people might be so interested in that heritage of horror. I’ve not yet sat with such a respectful audience, anywhere in the world.

I’ve come to the opinion that it’s necessary to remind people of this history. I hope as many Americans as possible see this movie.

Thank you for this review as it inspired me to see this film.

For me, "The Zone of Interest" requires repeated viewings, such is its maddening subtlety. I have now seen the film three times, and it gets better with each sitting. But you have to work towards the definition, very much akin to reading classic literature. And it's hard work, a challenging journey leading to deeply uncomfortable realizations. All of Jonathan Glazer's films freak me out, perhaps none more so than this film, further establishing him as one of the great directors of modern times. I would have never imagined telling the story of the Auschwitz concentration camp from this angle, essentially the domestic lives of Nazi Commandant Rudolph Höss and his family living at the walls of the murder camp. We never see what is taking place on the other side, but we can hear the hum of electric wires, trains arriving with prisoners, and we see smoke in the air from furnaces continuously burning dead bodies.

While having dinner, Höss and his family converse, as all families do, and they never once flinch when gunshots and screaming are heard. When the grandmother visits, she is given a tour of the backyard garden butting up against those ominous walls, and she beams with pride for what her daughter has created. "You have landed on your feet my dear." As they walk through the garden, a terrifying shriek is heard followed by a gunshot, and the grandmother stops ever so briefly, gazing at the wall, but her daughter continues walking through the garden describing the plants, never once pausing her conversation.

I'm not sure what to make of Rudolph Höss, continuously staring into space, sometimes on the river's shore, sometimes from a window, at one point ever so briefly inside the walls, ashes on the back of his neck, a calm look on his face. During the conclusion, he appears to be exhilarated by a promotion, and as he walks down solitary stairs, he begins gagging. He shakes it off and rights himself, and then he gags a second time, and a third time. At the bottom of the stairs in a terrifyingly dark hallway, he stares at the camera from afar. And the gaze returns.

Such calm evasion is deeply disturbing, and one realizes just how easy it is to deny evil, to go about one's day oblivious to what is taking place within our lives, accepting what was once unimaginable.

Had to wait two months, but my local indie-cinema will be playing this starting this weekend.

The opening 'scene' of the film is crucial, the black screen, held for a long time, with the strange and increasingly sinister music, making you wait and wait for the first image. Which is bucolic in a banal way. That tells you to pay attention to the sound and that it won't necessarily be connected to what you see. It also reminded me of the opening to two Kubrick films, 2001 (the similar long hold on the black screen) and the Shining (beautiful landscape and increasingly eerie music). I suspect that's quite deliberate on Glazer's part: the film subtly recalls the aural and musical tension in the Shining as a build up to the sudden horror reveals. (There's even a panning shot along the camp wall that recalls a similar shot of the maze hedge at the Overlook Hotel. There's also a long hold on a blank red screen in the middle of the film, which may be a deliberate recall of the elevator blood cascade.) Yet the Zone of Interest never does what it constantly threatens to do and which the Shining does: show a sudden glimpse of the horror we know happened (which, of course, the filmmaker presumes we know and that we can and will imagine). Where I think this works is that, 'knowing' what happened at the Nazi concentration camps, our imagination fills in the worst throughout almost the entire film with every hint - the plumes of smoke, the red flares from the furnaces at night, the distant screams, the ashes scattered, the clothing. And we're imagining this terror while the drab Hoss family are 'imagining' their banally serene future life 'after the war' and the murder of millions. It's profoundly effective for 2/3 of the film. The final 1/3, I'm not so sure, I felt the tension dissipated when the horror was clearly never going to become visual and the very effective thermal image interludes weren't really developed. Could or should Glazer have 'shown' a few seconds of what we were dreading seeing? I don't know. But I think the shock may have taken the film to another level. Still, it's quite a remarkable Holocaust film in that nobody tries to explain themselves (the Germans) and nobody bears witness (the Auschwitz inmates, mostly Jewish): the film seems to ask, in a fictional film, how could they? Especially after so much documentation and testimony left by survivors. Yet the film certainly does achieve what it sets out to do, show how all too easy it is to wall off the suffering of others.

Good analysis. My viewing companion hated the opening and I quite liked it—well, not “liked” in the conventional sense of the word, but thought it was powerful and effective for the kind of story that was about to be told. I’m a Kubrick fan too, and only just realized reading your comment that that might be why I thought so highly of that scene.

I too felt that the first 20-30 minutes of the film were the best and most gut-wrenching, and I also thought that, unfortunately, there was kind of something missing and that the ending was a bit rushed. So I was compelled to read about Höss in much more detail online after the movie, and I found out there was a lot missing! I would have liked to have seen more about the parts of his life that lay outside “the zone”.

That’s not even speaking of Hanns Alexander, the Jewish Nazi-hunter who brought Höss to justice. Now that guy really deserves a movie of his own!

For me this isn't as affecting as other Holocaust films as Schlinder's list or the Pianist, probably because I have studied the period extensively, so I'm well aware that the Nazi's were normal people, living as normal as possible lives, whilst perpetuating such horrors. Unfortunately this is human nature. Because of this I felt the banality of evil point was made in the first 5 minutes.

Also at no point did I connect with the family, feeling nothing but contempt for them and this was not helped by the fly on a wall nature of the film. If the director managed to get you to relate to the family I think it would be much more powerful

Technically though it is excellent, especially the sound design and the acting was very good

i forgot this was the guy who directed "under the skin". now after watching it and reading this review again, i can't help thinking how glazer depicts the höß-family as hostile aliens from another universe basically. i'm a german so i'm well aware that historically people voted for them and almost everyone and their dog adopted the nazi propaganda at some point during that time. still, there are all these phone calls and board meetings and economic talk that's just straightforward capitalism if it wasn't people talking about the most economic way to kill people. how the höß family lives so isolated and yet not-so-isolated-at-all next to the camp. is it a stretch to say that this isn't that far removed from today's ruling class and how they'll ignore the crises at their doors? not trying to deny the singularity of the holocaust here, but this specific aspect seems comparable.

And now Israel is doing this to Palestine. History really repeats itself in terrifying ways

Came here to read the review about a Holocaust movie. Seeing your thoughtless irrelevant post that has nothing to do with a movie you didn't even see is a terrifying lack of perspective and humanity.

Nope, they haven't created any death camps.

Except they murdered 17,000 people. Mostly women & children. Disgusting.

28,500 deaths now. Still going to give me thumbs down? Disgusting.

After the terrorist org broke a cease fire and killed, graped, and kidnapped over a thousand people. So really not the same at all.

False. I see you registered your account solely to drop your hatred here.

FYI - Palestine was a region known as Judea that renamed by the Romans. Fact is that the Muslims conquered this area later. Perhaps that is the only part of history repeating itself.

Nick, even the original Zionist leaders like Herzl and Jabotinsky readily admitted they were carrying out a colonial project to build a "barrier against the barbarism of Asia" and an "Iron Wall." They saw themsleves as EUROPEANS who had descended from the original Jews who now needed to ethnically cleanse a chunk of Palestine to establish an ethnostate. They were 19th century men and that ideology is playing out now in Gaza.

Not only is that a fabulous liberty of semantics, but you remarkably whiff on the most obvious human issue of them all. You've conveniently excused that 90% of the middle east has been "ethnocleansed" and Europe was doing the same. Yet you're persecuting the less than 1% for trying to fortify their tiny sanctuary. The elephant in the room is causing the problem.

Everyone has made their points here to the degree that comments not directly about the film or the review won’t be approved at least for a bit so we can get back to that discussion. I do want to say thanks to all for being relatively civil to one another so far.

"Let's give the United States back to the Natives!"

-Nick Tomaso

(on a side note, how messed up in the brain do you have to be to see someone pointing out thousands of deaths of innocent civilians and refer to that comment as "hatred?" Yeah, I know, Hamas is using them as human shields, so it's ok to kill the human shields Hamas is using.)

So you admit that Jews are the "natives" who were expelled.

Let's look bigger picture. Could they live in neighboring Syria? Egypt? They used to. But Sharia & Islamic Law (over 95% of the middle east) treats non-Muslims as lower class, unable to inherit land, etc. which is why they went from near 1 million in the 1940s to ZERO. Imagine if Black people were considered lower class citizens in the US, where they could only live in Delaware with equal rights?

The Israelis aren't trying to kill any civilians. That you know that Hamas thinks evens Gazans are totally dispensible lives says everything. They are trying to rescue remaining hostages (over 200.) If Israel doesn't stop the terror attacks, it's wash, rinse, repeat until Israel is completely wiped off the map. Desperate times and nowhere to go. What's your solution?

No I acknowledge that times have changed and it's not realistic to revert to borders that existed over a thousand years ago because a group of people feel that the land is holy. Taking away the land and borders that exist by force the way it was done for Israel in 1948 is imperialism. Period. It was not their land to take.

0 Jews in the 1940s in the Middle East? Israel was (re)formed in the 40s. The entire country existed in the 40s.

The Israelis are sure killing a lot of civilians for not trying to. Whether Hamas believes they are dispensible is irrelevant - Israel is firing the missiles that are indiscriminately killing innocent people. There is no argument around that, it is happening and you are defending it.

The solution is a two-state solution negotiated with diplomacy. Not indiscriminate bombing to destroy an entire people and their infrastructure. It is not antisemitic to criticize Israel for what are obvious war crimes happening in plain sight with the endorsement of the US government who is also no stranger to indiscriminately bombing Muslims.

Israel is not solving their problem, they are inspiring more brutality. Why do the Palestinians have no right to defend themselves? They were murdered regularly prior to October 7 but there is not a single peep out of the Israeli defenders about what led up to the attack. Just propaganda designed to gin up support for a brutal campaign of, again, indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, schools and residential areas. You think 9/11 happened in a vacuum? No, it was the result of our unwanted involvement in the Middle East for decades.

We're still waiting for the "evidence" of that hospital that was destroyed being a "command center." Instead we got a rent-a-cop drug show of a couple of rifles and laptops spread out on a table for maximum effect. Hundreds killed on a gut feeling rather than intelligence. And you are defending it.

While the Hamas attack was awful and should be condemned, I question whether the brutality displayed by them is any worse than the remote bombings leaving children dead and dismembered. That is also horrifying and should be condemned, not defended. Yet you are defending it.

Israel will never stop "terrorists" (what a stupid word - to imply that Israel is doing "good" here and not committing "terrorist" acts themselves is ridiculous on its face.) by bombing Gaza into oblivion. Quite the opposite - they are entrenching the conflict even deeper and playing right into the hands of Hamas. This is exactly what they wanted - to show the world the horrors of the Israeli government and break up their support in the world. Israel's dumb right-wing blowhard government not only allowed the attack to happen but responded in exactly the wrong way to prove they are "tough" and distract from their own security catastrophe.

"Terrorism" is the warfare of the poor. Warfare is the terrorism of the rich.

It's a disgrace that you dump your modern day issues on a Holocaust film. It's worse that you don't even know the basic facts or fundamental reasons the topic you think you're educating us about.

1) Your insistence of negotiating a two-state solution took place over 20 years ago. In 2000, Yasser Arafat, perhaps the most famous 'Palestinian' of all (born and raised in Egypt), ended up rejecting the peace treaty at Camp David which would have done just that.

2) Israel's creation in 1948 is about sanctuary from persecution - German and Muslim across the Middle East. During WW II (ending in 1945), Jews fled Europe and across the middle east due to persecution, going to Israel since it was a long established place of their original homeland and had no other place to go. The official recognition of the country 3 years later was not some type of spiritual awakening, but a place of permanent refuge. Since its creation, there have been repeated attacks and suicide bombings to destroy Israel by murdering Jews.

3) The Hamas charter itself says its purpose is the destruction of Israel. They will never accept a 2 state solution. Not exclusive to region is the isolation of civilians from the outside world, kept poor by the people in power (Hamas), and gaslighted into believing that they must die in suicide missions to complete this purpose. How touching of you that the incredible mass murder, rape, and beheading of over 1,000 innocent people in Israel (Jews AND non-Jews) should just be 'condemened." How do you stop Hamas from repeating this?

Seems you've deliberately ignored the point about the entire Islamic middle east Muslim empire that are the imperialists you speak of who conquered Israel and built a mosque on top of the Jewish temple. Muslims control 95% of the land and won't share any of it. You refuse to answer the question: where are the people in Israel supposed to live in peace and equality other than in Israel?

No war is okay.

I sometimes wonder if societies are not like people. Abused children often grow up to be abusers themselves, and as you note, certain of Israel's actions now eerily echo their own treatment at the hands of the Nazis.

Not a single action of Israel nor most countries remotely resembles what happened during the Holocaust - or Mao or Pol Pot. The comparison is ludicrous.

There's no connection the way you frame it.

It's a miss for me, somehow both overwrought and underbaked. The central story is really pedestrian--good Nazi gets promoted, would rather work at home--and gets more and more boring as it drags on. The first hour is electric, because you're waiting (and rooting) for their pretty little Nazi home life to get destroyed, but when the movie leaves that setting, it sinks quickly.

Glazer's use of stationary hidden cameras felt like a gimmick, and in the few scenes where he showed them off (a man moving through the big house turning off lights) it felt forced, certainly not organic or meaningful to the story. That said, many of the shots were beautifully framed, and the movie looks fantastic overall. Sound design is incredible.

There are also a number of unexpected artistic flourishes, like the extended black-screen opening and closing with creepy Mica Levi music. That really works. What doesn't work is a baffling sequence where suddenly you're watching completely different characters, filmed in photo-negative (and maybe CGI-enhanced?), doing who knows what. Suddenly I was watching Time Bandits. I mean, either I was tripping or there's a 5+ minute David Lynch freak-out section of this movie that made no sense whatsover, haha. That said, at the time it was happy respite from hour two of Hans gets a christmas bonus.

God bless Glazer, he went for it as always, and I praise him for swinging for the fences.

What WAS that about?? (The girl placing apples here and there?) I found myself wondering if the snippet of conversation where we hear a guard talking about a prisoner fighting over an apple was referring to one of her apples that the prisoner found...

I…was confused by that too. Was it one of the daughters’ dreams? Or was it the real life of the Polish slave-maid? Or something else entirely?

Also, who was playing the piano? I couldn’t see her face clearly and the idea of a member of the Höss family playing a song of resistance written by a Jewish prisoner made me scratch my head.

"Hans Gets A Christmas Bonus"--LOL

Wow, pretty major spoiler revealing that the movie cuts away to the present, why on Earth would you include that very unexpected detail in your review? I come to the Ebert site thinking I can read expert film criticism without having the movie spoiled, I'm seriously bummed you would give that away, jeez.

I mean, the literal point of the movie is that we're experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust from the very limited perspective of these people inside their little bunker. To the extent the movie breaks that conceit to offer a completely different perspective--well, frankly, that sounds like it's a pivotal moment in the movie. Certainly nothing they show in the trailer.

And yet it's been spoiled for me. I won't be able to experience the shock of that perspective shift. Thanks Robert!

it says on the top of the page that the review may contain spoilers... I too found that exposition jarring, but I knew I was reading at my own risk, so...

To be fair to the esteemed director of Red Dawn, I added that after his comment so others would know the risk too. I should have from publish this morning. Apologies.