McDaniel
On many lists of the best films of 2023, German-language “Zone of Interest” is the latest Oscar-nominated World War II movie. What sets it apart from other Holocaust dramas is we don’t see the horrors inside the concentration camps next door.
The camera stays on the human beings on the other side of the wall, German Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their children, who have carved out a pretty idyllic abode for themselves.
The film reminds us that everyone is the hero of their own story.
“We’re living how we dreamed we should,” Hedwig tells her husband when standing by the scenic river nearby, which provides a relaxing place to swim when the ashes of the dead aren’t floating in it. “Everything we want at our doorstep.”
While Hedwig gives grandma a walking tour of the lovely house, beautiful garden grounds and pool, we faintly hear the shouts, gunfire, and sometimes see the billowing smoke from the incineration of Jews being exterminated. It’s always there beyond the rose-vined wall that separates their oasis from the German Auschwitz concentration camp.
And that’s what makes the movie so memorable. Intentionally treated with dispassion, the terror just never quite comes into focus.
It’s a story of perspective. Showing the main family as pretty normal human beings with hopes and dreams, the barely-acknowledged hell always looming on the other side of the wall is a disturbing contrast.
The movie doesn’t fall back on the visual shock of the atrocities of the Holocaust like so many films before it. We don’t see the graphic killing or the emaciated workers, because Dad leaves his work at the office; it just so happens that his work is mass genocide.
Rudolf is a proud, ambitious leader, and it feels as if by not showing the other side of the wall, the Nazis aren’t seeing it for what it is. Worse yet, it forces the audience to feel complicit, almost numb to what’s happening. And that look at humanity is what will stay with me for a while.
The true ending of this dark history is that Rudolf and his comrades achieved their goal of being remembered, just not in the heroic light they hoped.
4.5 / 5
Scott McDaniel is an assistant professor of journalism at Franklin College. He lives in Bargersville with his wife and three kids.
