The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s fourth film, may be the most terrifying vision of the Holocaust that I have seen on the big screen. For the most part, films treat the Holocaust as a rupture of the western Enlightenment project – either a temporary rupture, that can be assuaged by the uplifting gesture of the Holocaust film itself, or a more permanent rupture, echoing Theodor Adorno’s famous observation that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” Films in the latter category, such as Son of Saul, tend to adopt a grittier approach, almost an anti-aesthetic, to demonstrate that art itself has been compromised in some irrevocable way by the ongoing legacy of the Final Solution. However, The Zone of Interest is the first film I have seen that conforms to Jacques Derrida’s more contentious reading of the Holocaust – that it was not a rupture of the Enlightenment project but in some sense a fulfilment of that project, if we understand it to consist on the one of hand of the new religion of nationalism, and on the other as drive towards the totalising discourse of dictionaries, encyclopedias, taxonomies and discrete scientific disciplines. For Derrida, the Holocaust was a monstrous yet logical culmination of this drive towards a nationalistic and totalising mode of control.

While it is nominally based on Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, Glazer’s film is primarily an effort to depict the Holocaust from the perspective of people who see it as just such a utopian gesture of totalisation – or at least people who are fine enough with that idea to leverage it for their own professional aspirations. Glazer thus treats the Holocaust as an event in the most profound way, as an apotheosis of the nation state into a ten thousand year Reich that commandeers every possible facet of German’s resource pool. Within that context, Glazer’s central gesture is to focus exclusively on the routines of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) as they go about their lives in the residence adjoining the concentration camp. While we hear noises from the camp, and hear about the camp, we never see it, although we are continually aware of it as a part of the film’s visual scheme, since Glazer almost entirely depicts these figures in long or extreme long shots, resorting to distorted perspective and cold light inside the residence to maintain the impression of distance.

Before we even arrive at the residence, however, the film begins with a six-minute overture composed by Mica Levi. Like the voids at the heart of Berlin’s Holocaust museum, these surreal electronic tones evoke everything unrepresentable about the Final Solution, while investing the Nazi party with the alien agency that Levi previously attributed to Scarlett Johansson’s character (or creature) in Under the Skin. This overture sets the scene for a film in which the visceral horror of the Holocaust is largely conveyed through sound design – what we hear but don’t see in Glazer’s immaculate mise-en-scenes, both diegetically, in the inchoate cries and charnel rumblings of the death camp, and non-diegetically, in the periodic intrusions of Levi’s otherworldly tones, which evoke an ambient horror that can’t be pinned down to one shot or sightline. Like many people, I’ve watched so many Holocaust films that certain images, or visual tropes, have become familiar to the point of sanitisation, so I found it really renewed the ontological horror for it all to be shifted to the auditory plane. Hollywood Holocaust films also tend to have a sentimental or at least expressive score, which renders the long periods here without non-diegetic music especially terrifying too, particularly when they pair the white noise of the death camp with a pastoral soundscape. In one scene, Hoss points out local herons to his son, and explains their birdsong, while prisoners can be heard marching off screen. The only piece of discernible dialogue from Auschwitz – a prisoner being shot for supposedly taking an apple – occurs during a serene mise-en-scene in which the Hoss’ gardener is raking the steaming, fecund earth. 

As those last two examples might suggest, Glazer is keen to give vivid aesthetic expression to the Nazi concept of the volksgemeinschaft – the Aryan folk homeland that could only be created by eradicating Jews and other undesirables. The first few shots of the film emphasise this (supposedly) utopian project, presenting us with the Hoss family, from an extreme distance, as a series of bucolic bodies ensconced in a state of nature. As they bathe, amble and marvel at the natural world, the only indication of the Holocaust is the dim palette, which evokes the particulate matter of recently cremated bodies, a displaced people that is everywhere and nowhere. So subliminal is this palette that it feels continuous with the white noise that first signals the presence of Auschwitz, and together they turn the death camp into an entity that is not quite visible or audible so much as tangible, a kind of vibration in the ether that speaks eloquently to our present moment, in which the textures of everyday life in the west are contoured by the ambient awareness of genocide occurring elsewhere. Even in the west, though, Nazism is starting to become part of these quotidian textures once again, and so The Zone of Interest also belongs with a series of recent texts, most notably The New Look, which seek to remove Nazis from the monumental distance of history and consider how they might have looked, and might still look, in everyday life.

Still, the main project of The Zone of Interest is to imagine the Holocaust as the logical yet horrific conclusion of the Enlightment project. To that end, everything in the arrangement of the death camp and the organisation of Hoss’ house is systematic, rationalised and compartmentalised; this is the Holocaust as immaculate mise-en-scene, characterised by taste and decorum above all else, even or especially when Hoss and his colleagues are discussing the logistics and expansion of the gas chambers. In his Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer, the writer who saw in German Expressonism a forerunner of Nazism, outlined several different forms of horror, starting with the most plastic or primitive (reliance on props, reliance on in-camera effects) to the purest, which he described using a simple thought-experiment: imagine a normal living room, and then imagine a body concealed behind a piece of furniture. By trafficking in that form of horror, The Zone of Interest feels closer in spirit to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah than to any fictional film, offering us a vision of the Holocaust as procedure above all, and embedding that procedure in its real setting, to provide a spatially specific account of the mechanics of genocide.

In this way, Glazer aestheticises the Holocaust as the pinnacle of Nazi spatial, logistical, infrastructural and architectural aspiration, so synonymous with the fact of total industrialisation that employees at the death camp become indistinguishable from employees at nearby factories that provide equipment for the death camp. Just as Hoss and his colleagues discuss the spatial scheme of Auschwitz with detached clinicism, so his wife Hedwig proudly outlines the grounds and garden of her residence for her mother, and attributes these to this broader industrial project, of which genocide is simply the crowning glory: “These were empty fields only three years ago.” Like so many other figures in the film, Hedwig admires the Holocaust for stimulating the economy by creating jobs, new towns and a general sense of national pride in German production, whether of ashes or machinery.

That all amounts to the most terrifying Holocaust film I’ve seen, one in which the Final Solution is evoked as an inexorable infrastructure that still feels futuristic today, rather than being relegated to a conveniently and sentimentally closed past. The final ingredient of that horror is the way in which Glazer mirrors the methodical spatial rationalism of the Nazis in his own directorial vision, in which mise-en-scene is also important above all else. Just as Hoss issues directives that any SS officers who pick lilacs in a destructive, visible or ungainly manner (who will cause the lilac bush to “bleed”) will be severely punished, every single one of Glazer’s own images is meticulously and paranoically controlled. Like Hoss as he discusses the death camp with colleagues, or Hedwig as she takes her mother on a tour of the residence, Glazer offers a demonstration above all, or perhaps more accurately a meta-demonstration, a demonstration of the demonstrative rhetoric of the Holocaust in everyday German life.

One of the eerier byproducts of this approach is that it reframes the Nazis as the original proponents of a certain strand of contemporary corporate life. Far from being presented as an embodiment of chaotic evil, Hoss here is like a CEO committing horrific acts but for the sake of his family, and maintaining a “professional” work-life balance to deal with that schism. He’s driven by corporate decorum as much as ideology, adopting a managerialist approach to genocide or, as one of his colleagues puts it, “turning theory into practice.” This produces the schizoid division between work and home life demanded by the modern corporate sphere – doing amoral, or immoral things at work, for the sake of supporting the family unit – except that in this case the hinge between the two worlds is remarkably literal, since the Hoss household is built into the concentration camp walls, acting as an ancillary to and prop for atrocity in the most concrete way. Within that context, everything is and can be rationalised, reduced to a “structural shift,” much as Hoss hopes to further his career by collating a new set of facts, figures and procedures for exterminating the Hungarian Jewish population.

Glazer thus presents the Holocaust both as the monstrous culmination of Enlightenment and as an inception point for postmodern neomanagerialism, meaning that The Zone of Interest is above all a narrative of professional and managerial self-realisation. Hoss yearns to escape middle management and join the Nazi executive, producing some of the scariest moments in the film, in which Hedwig appeals to him to talk to Hitler, Himmler and the rest of the Nazi elite, not as remote abstractions of evil, but as his immediate bosses, mentors and coaches. Insofar as Glazer’s film can arrive at a crisis, it is only in the form of thwarted professional aspiration, so it feels right that Hedwig only learns about Hoss’ upcoming transferral at the very apex of showcasing the house and gardens, with a party orchestrated around her swimming pool, and just after her mother has congratulated her on her stunning upward mobility. Likewise, it’s only now that Glazer traverses the extreme long shots of the film – for the first medium shots, when Hoss and Hedwig discuss their professional and bourgeois futures, and then the only close-ups, when Hoss tells his children at the dinner table about his impending departure, while assuring them that it won’t compromise the sanctity of the family unit. Hedwig’s condition for Hoss’ sideways promotion is that she stays behind when he is relocating, insisting that their home is their “lebensraum” and that she expects to remain attached to the death camp in perpetuity as an indication of their executive status.

With this professional and managerial crisis thwarted, the third act of the film both congeals the Enlightenment infrastructure of the Holocaust while questioning how complicit our contemporary gaze might be in it, both inside and outside of Glazer’s film. The action now shifts to Berlin, where we see Hoss immersing himself in his new role of managing the extermination of Hungarian Jews, culminating with a scene in which he gazes out at the regalia, ceremony and ambience of a Nazi event as he calmly informs Hedwig that a key logistical component of the Final Solution has been named after him, all the while idly contemplating the practical challenges of gassing in this particular space. Our last glimpse of Hoss is alone in this same building, surrounded by stairwells and corridors that dissolve into darkness, like the hyper-structural projects of the Enlightenment reduced to their amoral or immoral core. In one of the more surprising moments of the film, we then see the ovens and interiors of the camp for the first time, along with the material possessions of the Jews who were killed there, but in the present, as part of the commemorative museum set up at Auschwitz. The displays are being cleaned for the morning, and the odd calm that hangs over everything reiterates that the spatial scheme of the museum, with its gleaming cabinets, rigorous sightlines, and scrupulous segmentation, is not different in kind from that of the film itself, or the Holocaust machine that it embodies. The final note of The Zone of Interest, then, is a scepticism with texts that curate, commemorate or comment upon the Holocaust by framing it as a lapse in Enlightenment logic that can be redressed by falling back upon the Enlightenment categories of museum, classification or taxonomy. What we see in these final scenes is, in its own way, management of the historical image, and it is this management, as a supposedly neutral and aspirational action, that lies at the terrifying kernel of Glazer’s film.