The Power of Absence: A Reflection on The Zone of Interest
Sometimes, not showing can be far more powerful than explicitly depicting something. This is the core strength of The Zone of Interest, a film that has been widely acclaimed and won the 2023 Academy Award for Best International Feature.
After hearing so much praise, I finally took the time to watch it, and I must say, it offers a strikingly different perspective on the Holocaust—one that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.
A Different Approach to Holocaust Films
Most Holocaust films, like The Pianist or Schindler’s List, focus on the horrors suffered by victims, portraying stories of survival, escape, or acts of heroism amid atrocity. However, The Zone of Interest takes a radically different approach. Instead of depicting the suffering inside the concentration camps, it focuses on the perpetrators—the family of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. But rather than showing him committing acts of brutality, the film presents his everyday life, his home, and his family. He is portrayed as a devoted father and husband, while his wife enjoys the luxuries that come with his position. Their world is disturbingly normal, despite their home being situated right next to a death camp.
The film does not explicitly show the horrors of Auschwitz. Instead, we hear them. The distant screams, the gunshots, the ever-present background hum of suffering. For the Höss family, these sounds have become mundane, part of the everyday routine—just as someone living near a factory might grow accustomed to the noise of machines. This normalization of horror is what makes The Zone of Interest so unsettling.
The Banality of Evil
One of the most chilling moments in the film occurs when Höss and his children are swimming in a river. He suddenly notices a skull and blood floating in the water. His immediate reaction is not one of shock or horror at the evidence of mass murder, but rather frustration—he orders his children out of the water, irritated that it has been contaminated and that the prized canoe he received as a birthday gift is no longer useful. His concern is not for the victims, but for the inconvenience it poses to him. This moment encapsulates the moral apathy that pervades the film.
His wife, played brilliantly by Sandra Hüller, is another disturbing figure. She is fully aware of what is happening just beyond their garden walls. At one point, she even tells a house servant that she could have had her burned in the crematorium. She is not just complicit in the atrocities—she revels in the privileges that come from them. She enjoys the wealth taken from murdered prisoners, the fine clothes, and the comforts of life while others are being starved and gassed to death a stone’s throw away. She is a monster, not because she commits the crimes herself, but because she embraces them as a source of personal luxury.
A Moment of Discomfort and Awareness
An interesting subplot involves the grandmother of the family. When she arives immediately he expresses frustration about train delays, which is a chilling parallel to the suffering of Holocaust victims crammed into those very same trains, being transported to their deaths. She is inconvenienced, but she does not recognize the far greater horrors endured by those for whom these trains were a death sentence.
As a mother, she is proud of her daughter's success and the life they have built. We see much of what the daughter has accomplished with this place, yet there is no mention of its location or its relation to the camp. She mentions trying to use bushes and greenery to hide the camp, which is the closest mention of it. She even casually mentions how essential it was to install heating for the house, without realizing that the camp has the complete opposite conditions, where people suffer and die from extreme cold and hypothermia.
Over time, she begins to realize the full extent of what is happening. Unlike the rest of the family, she is visibly uncomfortable with the reality they have chosen to ignore. She does not actively resist, but she does not fully accept it either. This offers a rare moment of reflection in the film—a glimpse of what a more “normal” reaction to such atrocities might have been.
A Chilling Ending: The Darkness Within
The most haunting part of the film comes near the end, when Höss is temporarily transferred close to Berlin. At a social gathering, he remains distant, barely engaging in conversation. His mind is elsewhere, not on his family, not on the people around him, but on efficiency—he is thinking about how to improve the extermination process. He is consumed by his role as a mass murderer, even in moments that should be personal or social. This moment reinforces that, for him, killing is not just his job—it is his obsession.
In the final scenes, we see Höss proudly returning to Auschwitz, tasked with operation deporting over 400,000 Hungarian Jews named after him. The scene shows him walking down a staircase, moving from darkness toward a light. We then see present-day workers cleaning the Auschwitz memorial exhibition, which includes glass cases displaying Holocaust victims' clothes, memorabilia, and uniforms. For these workers, it is an everyday job, much like any other maintenance work. This subtle yet powerful moment reflects how horror, over time, can become normalized—even to those tasked with preserving its memory. It serves as a warning about how easily society can grow desensitized to evil.
The scene then returns to Höss walking down the steps again, ending abruptly.
Why The Zone of Interest is a Masterpiece
By focusing on the perpetrators and primarily on their families, rather than directly on the victims, The Zone of Interest sheds light on the psychological mechanisms that allowed such atrocities to occur. It forces us to question how ordinary people—people who love their families, who laugh, who celebrate—can become so indifferent to mass murder. It serves as a reminder that evil is not always committed by monsters in the shadows, but often by people who view themselves as completely normal.
This film does not show the Holocaust in the traditional sense, yet it forces the audience to confront its horrors in a uniquely disturbing way. The absence of direct imagery makes it even more powerful—because we, the viewers, fill in the gaps with our own knowledge of history. The power of suggestion, combined with an atmosphere of eerie normalcy, creates a chilling effect that lingers long after the film is over.
This is what makes The Zone of Interest one of the most remarkable Holocaust films ever made. It is a harrowing experience, but an essential one.
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Image: https://www.erinnern.at/bundeslaender/vorarlberg/termine/filmpraesentation-the-zone-of-interest
The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, 2023.