A nauseating examination of complicity in the face of evil, The Zone of Interest, observes a family that shares its garden wall with Auschwitz. Its striking resonance, garnering five Academy Award nominations and the Grand Prix at the Festival de Cannes, sets it in place as a companion piece with another historical drama, Schindler’s List. In their respective films, Jonathan Glazer and Steven Spielberg unveil the Holocaust. But beyond the primary connection in subject matter, the films invite a consideration of cinematic language and form. As Susan Sontag describes in her essay, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, capturing images is ‘a grammar and […] an ethics of seeing.’ In their pursuits of presenting the truth, the directors’ methods diverge on these very fundamentals. While Spielberg points the camera towards horror, Glazer looks away.
Schindler’s List chronicles the persecution of Jews in Poland through the lens of Oskar Schindler, a German capitalist who we first meet meticulously fastening his cufflinks and tightening his tie, interested in nothing more than the bundle of cash in his drawer. Spielberg approaches Schindler with a need for understanding, unravelling him from a tunnel-visioned industrialist to a compassionate, and unexpected, humanitarian. While the film strives to find empathy with its protagonist, it is equally insistent on exposing the pain undergone by the victims of the Holocaust in all its brutality.
Such an unwavering drive towards immersion is native to Spielberg’s idea of filmmaking. The parallels may not seem obvious, after all, the director’s aesthetic sensibilities are rooted in escapist Hollywood movies. E.T sparks wonder, and while Jaws may terrify us, it never forcefully submerges itself into bleakness. Spielberg’s personal philosophy seems to be that the cinema is a place where we escape the present. His imagined worlds are marked by a relentless attention to detail and mastery of all the cinematic elements: fluid cameras drift through seemingly infinite space, capturing actors performing calibrated and sharply engineered scripts with a shameless openness to sentimentality.
In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg weaponizes his own formula, guiding us not into a dreamy fantasy, but a nightmare reality where no truths are hidden, no matter how horrifying they may be. A personification of evil, Ralph Fiennes plays commandant Amin Göth as a sociopath whose sadism is enabled by the Nazi machinery. Yet, it’s Liam Neeson who is the fulcrum of the story: his transformation from tall-statured charmer to a man falling to his knees under the weight of his own guilt is emblematic of the language that Spielberg uses to tell this story. In Schindler’s List, it’s all about seeing. As Oskar confronts the suffering of the Holocaust, so do we, but that only happens when he steps foot into a concentration camp – when Spielberg takes the camera and points it towards horror.
In this sense, The Zone of Interest works as an antithesis to Schindler’s List. In telling the story of the family next door to one of the greatest atrocities ever committed, it tells a story of denial, of looking away. This idea is established in the film’s opening moments, as we observe a haunting black screen that discomforts in how long it overstays its welcome, hearing Mica Levi’s escalating ambient score clashing with the muffles of voices. From the beginning, Glazer establishes a different kind of cinematic grammar, effectively telling us that two films will be playing at once: the one we see, and the one we hear.
This conflict between sight and sound is a constant struggle throughout the film, tugging back and forth. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal watches the Höss family from a distance, capturing every fragmented moment of joy in their ‘dream home’, whether it be a birthday surprise or a stroll through their blossoming garden. All the while, sound designer Johnnie Burn’s throbbing drones and distant wails linger in the background. Now, the camera’s fixedness ceases to be curious and begins to feel voyeuristic. Paralysed, it stares at the family patriarch, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, calmly walking to work, unable to intervene in the agony he is about to bestow.
In The Zone of Interest, Glazer hands over a deliberately unfinished cinematic landscape to the audience, pointing one step away from the truth, forcing us to complete the film by finding the way ourselves. Maybe the most harrowing aspect of it all is the unwillingness to commit to any moral certainties. The perpetrators are ordinary, mundane, and unsettlingly familiar to us. The film closes as it opens, a long black screen, preventing us from escaping the realisation that the roots of evil are embedded in us all, and that history may repeat itself again.
“Liam Neeson” by Nathan Congleton is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.