The Zone of Interest 🎥

The movie poster shows a very lush and pretty garden with children playing in the pond in the center. In the distance, you can see the gray wall separating the garden from the Auschwitz concentration camp, creating a stark contrast between two separate ‘lifestyles.’ In the center, the movie’s name ‘The Zone of Interest’ is visible.

⚠️ Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen this movie yet and plan on watching it someday, don’t continue reading. It’s hard to talk about media without spoiling the story and I’m not about to put in the effort 💜

Eerie how there is no background music. The silence is quite literally deafening. You just hear sounds like the humming of a machine that sounds almost like an incinerator. The family which takes center-stage is headed by a commander at the nearby camp and everyone plays their part in the nuclear family. Fifteen minutes in, you see some military officer dropping off a batch of high quality clothes. It is odd to see a military officer doing deliveries until you remember what this movie is about. The clothes – including a fur coat – were probably expropriated from deported Jews being incinerated at the nearby camp.

In the distance you frequently hear men barking orders while the women sip tea and gossip about the kind of clothing and accessories they managed to thrift from Jewish women sent to the camps. There is a scene in which the house patriarch who works at the camp shows an architect explaining how the incinerator works, continuously burning around 500 people1 every seven hours. The parallels between the occasional screams from women and children2 and the relatively benign problems of this family living off a genocide that gives them Lebensraum3 as the Führer intended.

The way they speak about the victims makes it obvious they’d rather not think about them any further. One of them was up to “Bolshevik stuff, Jewish stuff,” justifying her incineration, apparently. Very casually, the housewife tells her mother4 (who was visiting her for the first time since her move to Auschwitz) how she snatched the curtains she’d been eying at that Jewish woman’s house when her stuff was sold for cheap. The house is right next to the concentration camp and only a wall separates the two. The housewife talks about how soon the grape vines would grow and cover up the wall so its nature wouldn’t be as noticeable. All of this was said with total indifference.

The whole movie was filled with moments like that where it was treading a thin line between superficially normal elements that were totally abhorrent if you looked closer. While I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening on my first watch because of the lack of dialogue, the movie still gave me the creeps and I believe it’s well done. Don’t watch it before going to sleep like I did, though!

P.S.: If you’re as appalled as me, but think we couldn’t be as cold-blooded about other humans' suffering, look no further than to how we treat homeless, queer, disabled, and racialized people. Israel itself is exterminating a people on one side of the wall while another people live on their normal lives on the other side – exactly like in this movie.

Rating: 3.5/5

  1. They don’t actually say “people,” but it’s clear what they mean. ↩︎

  2. And most likely men as well, but it’s hard to tell with all the guards barking orders. ↩︎

  3. living space ↩︎

  4. Who ends up leaving one day without saying goodbye because she couldn’t stand the sound of screams. She was very obviously a nazi, just not nazi enough to unhear the agony from the nearby camp. Her leaving was the most defiance we got out of any of the characters. ↩︎

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