I have seen many films about the Holocaust, from The Devil’s Arithmetic to Life is Beautiful, but never have I seen such a sickeningly interesting film on the subject. It is 1943, and Rudolf Höss runs the Auschwitz concentration camp. His family, blissfully unaware of the horrors occurring next to their house, lounge lakeside in the summer, the plumes of smoke that rise from the camps crematoria far in their rearview mirror. Their lives are perfect; a happy marriage, healthy children, a pool, a large garden, and a wall to one of the most deadly concentration camps plopped right in their backyard. When I first saw this film (and I saw it two times in the theater) I was immediately transfixed. Everything, from the costumes, to the sets, to the noises in the background were all so painstakingly perfect. Even Hedwig’s hair was set to perfection, most likely immovable even if the strongest hurricane came barreling down on her blonde head. And yet, beyond this perfection, you could so plainly see the tragedies that were playing out beyond the Höss’ marigolds, the pain everyone else was enduring while they were stuffing their faces with cakes and dressing themselves with stolen furs from Auschwitz’s Kanada. 

When Jonathan Glazer set out to start this film, I believe his whole point was to understand evil. Not to dissuade anyone from believing the Nazi’s and the Höss’ weren’t evil, but just to see life from their point of view. Besides, with every story there are always two sides, even if one of them is very, very wrong. In a scene that is by far the most mundane, but is definitely the most evocative to me, is when Hedwig Höss (Sandra Huller) receives a fur coat from a prisoner who comes by her cottage to drop off some items she had presumably requested. Like all of the other clothing items wrenched out of the hands and off of the cold bodies of the European Jews and Roma who were forced through the iron gates of Auschwitz, this coat went straight to the wife of a Nazi official. What was partiuclarly haunting about this specific scene was what Hedwig found in the pocket of the gorgeous coat; a pink lipstick. And Hedwig did not throw the lipstick away, she put it on. This scene is not only visually disturbing and heartbreaking, but further adds to the idea that the Höss’, and presumably other Nazi officials as well, did not view the prior owners of the items as human. Or, perhaps they refused to acknowledge the person’s existence at all, and deemed the lipstick new, therefore finding it completely acceptable to use. Whatever reason they used to justify the situatoin, and whatever Glazer had intended, it’s still so heartbreaking to watch, knowing that that coat and lipstick had once adorned a woman who is now either fighting for her life, or dead. 

A part of this film that is the most devastating, but also the most impressive, is the sound design. When Glazer set about creating this film, he did not want to show the familiar Polish concentration camp, but wished to reflect everything through sound.The racket of dogs barking, gunshots being fired, and the screams of the prisoners are all overlayed with actual sound bites taken in Oscwiecm, Poland by Glazer and his sound designer in present day. The resounding peacefulnes of the landscape mixed with the assembled noises of the past is so transfixing it’s hard to miss. In most films, at least ones created in the past 20 to 30 years, the sound design is typically instrumental or taken from current popular songs, creating iconic soundtracks for us to listen to on our phones. But Zone of Interest does something not many films have been able to do; melt into the background so well it scrapes the depth of your soul. It’s hard to envision how Auschwitz would have sounded at the height of it’s use, but I believe Glazer and his team accomplished a miraculous feat in creating something so close to the real thing. In films that are about the Holocaust, it is all about the story of survival. But something most people forget is that sounds speak just as loud as words, and if you listen close enough to The Zone of Interest, you can hear the truth blaring in your ears.