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“The Zone of Interest” offers a chilling new perspective on the Holocaust.
Nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, the film (which opens nationwide on Friday) takes place just outside the walls of Auschwitz, in a stately villa, where real-life Nazi commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) lives with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). ), his five children and a dog.
What makes the film especially heartbreaking is that you never set foot inside the concentration camp or witness the violence on screen. Rather, the audience is subjected to distant screams and gunshots as the indifferent Höss family goes about their daily lives: playing in the pool, lounging in the backyard, or eating dinner together.
“I hesitated to participate because I didn’t dream of portraying a Nazi woman,” says Hüller. But speaking with director and co-writer Jonathan Glazer, she was compelled by his “smart artistic choices,” in depicting the subject in a way “that she had never seen before.”
Glazer “wasn’t interested in sensationalizing these atrocities,” says Johnnie Burn, an Oscar nominee for best sound. “It is essential that everyone has their own understanding of what happened there. These mental images that we all have are quite easy to reproduce through the suggestion of sound.”
‘The Zone of Concern’ is a Holocaust film about ‘the darkness within us’
Burn compiled 600 pages of research to ensure historical accuracy, detailing what times of day transport trains arrived and executions of Jewish prisoners took place. As Rudolf and Hedwig chat idly in bed, the dull roar of the crematorium ovens can be heard just outside their window. At other times, it is difficult to determine where exactly a dog’s barking or a baby’s cries are coming from.
“Do I hear the children shouting in amusement in the garden or is it something more frightening?” Burn says. The sounds of the concentration camp were added entirely in post-production, allowing the cast to approach the script as a “family drama” rather than the horror film it actually is.
“That’s what gives you that extraordinary feeling of, ‘I know you can close your eyes but you can’t close your ears, so how come you don’t hear what I hear?’” Burn says. “This environmental genocide that permeates all of their worldly concerns and problems is the reason the film works.”
For Hüller, it was important not to understand or humanize her icy matriarch, who boasts of being “the Queen of Auschwitz.”
“We didn’t investigate them too much because we didn’t want to psychologize any behavior,” says the German actress. Filming in Poland, not far from the original camp, “we as people were very aware of what had happened in this area at that time. But it was easy to let the characters forget it.”
Amid conversations about spa days and home improvements, Glazer drops disturbing reminders of the Höss family’s indifference. Hedwig tries on lipstick and a fur coat confiscated from the dead, while one of her sons collects gold teeth. In another stomach-churning scene, Rudolf furiously wipes ashes off his body after swimming in a nearby river, where he discovered a human jaw hours earlier.
Friedel’s biggest challenge was to give “this evil person a human face” through his “banal actions at home.” The film illustrates how many ordinary people felt emboldened by the Nazi party, willing to turn a blind eye in exchange for wealth and power. The real Höss was eventually hanged for his war crimes in 1947.
“He thought he was a really important person, but he wasn’t at all,” Friedel says. “This is not just a film about the Holocaust: it is about our decisions, the darkness within us and what we are capable of doing.”
Best Actress Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller also stars in ‘Anatomy of a Fall’
“The Zone of Interest” is one of two films that Hüller, 45, has in the Oscar race this season. She is also nominated for best actress for “Anatomy of a Fall,” a French courtroom thriller that is up for best picture and best director (Justine Triet). In the film, Hüller plays an author accused of the murder of her husband, who suspiciously jumped from the balcony of her chalet.
“It’s really rare to have a multidimensional female character these days,” Hüller says of her role in “Anatomy.” “I like a lot of things about her: the way she stands up for herself and how she doesn’t apologize for her decisions.”
Hüller has been touring the world for months promoting “Anatomy” and “Zone,” both of which won top awards at the Cannes Film Festival in France last May. Despite her grueling travel schedule, she is grateful that each of them has been so immensely embraced.
“Women tend to say, ‘I was very lucky,’ because they tend to underestimate their own work,” Hüller says. “I know I did a really good job. I also know that I was very lucky. Nobody could know that both films would be finished at the same time and would enter competition at Cannes. So I really enjoy it, but at the same time I’m ready to come home.”
