The Zone of Interest is a haunting film, portraying the lives of a Nazi commander and his family who live next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is a technical masterpiece, pairing a haunting score and chilling sound design with incredible cinematography. While it doesn’t have much of a story or compelling characters, The Zone of Interest is as highly regarded as it is by its storytelling and technical design.
The Zone of Interest makes the deliberate choice to never explicitly show the treatment of the Jews. Instead, we are subjected to hearing the screams of the victims as they are shot, gassed, and burned. It truly was an unsettling experience. Even when the movie shows it, it’s done creatively, like the shot I used for this review or the river scene. The movie doesn’t use music much, but when it does, it just amplifies horror. The movie was nominated for Best Sound at the Oscars (amongst many other things) and it absolutely should be seen as a front-runner.
When I say horror, I don’t mean in the traditional sense we’re used to now. There aren’t jump scares or explicit violence, but the implied torture and evil become so much more unsettling and rattling. There is a line at the end of the movie that legitimately made my mouth drop. It was so inhumanely evil yet was said so cavalier that my skin crawled.
While there isn’t much in the way of a plot, the way we follow the family’s life is incredibly fascinating. I don’t watch too many World War 2 movies but this is the first that I’ve seen told from the point of view of the Nazis. The way that they ignore the terror next door as they attempt to create the perfect house. All the screams and gunshots are just background noise to them as they host parties and tend to their garden.
There’s no better scene to describe it than when the wife’s mother comes to visit. They throw a party and to the family all is perfect. But the mother is an outsider who becomes horrified by the atrocities being committed next door and leaves immediately. The young children in the house paid it no mind, and it sat in my stomach like a rock.
As I said in the introduction, there really isn’t a plot. It’s more of a “here’s a snapshot of this period of time” type of movie. I find that I gravitate more towards story-oriented movies but this is the exception. There’s enough story of the father running the Auschwitz camp and his wife refusing to leave their home to satisfy that part of my brain.
Seeing how the family lived their life with the horrors happening in the background was what really resonated with the viewers. There were maybe a couple of scenes that I didn’t completely understand but I imagine a rewatch would provide more clarity.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I was initially lower on The Zone of Interest when I first got out of my showing. I didn’t really know how I felt because there wasn’t a story to latch onto and we don’t know much about any of the characters beyond the evilness they live with. But now, a couple of days later, I am very high on this movie. The sounds and score are haunting, the cinematography is pristine, and the subject matter is blood-chilling. The movie balances subtle evil and outright terror incredibly well, and it is a movie that will sit like a rock in your stomach well after you’re done seeing it.
