The Zone of Interest offers a disturbing look at Nazi Germany

AI-generated image of WWII

THE ZONE OF INTEREST is a film, I think, that demonstrates quite clearly the banality of evil. This phrase, coined by Hannah Arendt, refers to the fact that evil people are often quite ordinary, even boring. We saw this with the characters in the film. And I think that's what gave THE ZONE OF INTEREST its power.

We meet the Höss family:  a husband, his wife, their kids. They have a nice house. The parents, as do most, read to their children before bed. They seem to have friends. But Höss--that is, Rudolph Höss--is the director at Auschwitz. The family lives next to the camp. And you can hear the screams of the people being burned alive as the Hoss family goes about their activities. They pretend not to notice. But they do. The presence of the camp and its infernal noises--its whirring machines, the screams of pain--drive Höss’s mother-in-law from the home. She'd come by for a visit. 

The evil in the film is modern and bureaucratic. The Nazi regime was German, after all, and Germany is, of course, a sort of progenitor of many of our systemic, bureaucratic things. The people involved in these crimes have meetings and discuss promotions. It's like we're witness, at times, to a corporate board executive session. 

But evil is evil, and when you invite evil into your life, it will spread like a virus. There is a telling scene where Hoss is taking his children on a fishing trip, and the detritus from the death camp--the detritus being ashed human bodies--begins poisoning the river, like sin entering Eden. Höss finds a piece of a skeleton. He immediately takes his kids home and demands they be washed. And he frantically washes himself, as if he's trying to cleanse himself of the terrible things he has done. 

Because that's the other lesson of the film--that even though human beings are capable of great evil and terror, we weren't made for that purpose. And so the body rejects evil, as if it's a pathogen. Which is why Höss, later in the film, is shown wondering why he has so many digestive problems. And we see him walking down the stairs, heading home from "work," and then he stops, retching. His body can't physically handle the terror he's caused. 

The film stays with the Höss family, and I think that was the right choice. In this instance, we don't need the Allies coming in as liberators. We need to see evil as it is. We need to watch it and not turn away. The choices Jonathan Glazer, the director made, help us do this. And we don't want to sentimentalize the story. Sentimentality is another kind of turning away. 

We need to see what this family did. We need to see what the Nazi regime did. We need to confront it. Because this is an evil that never goes away.