Review: 'The Zone of Interest' is a chilling look at the Holocaust, looking at a family's peaceful complicity outside the walls

It’s been said that fiction can only look obliquely at the Holocaust — that, like an eclipse, the Nazis’ mechanized genocide of 6 million Jews cannot be viewed full-on, because the pain is too intense to witness.

To examine the Holocaust without being overwhelmed by that pain, storytellers have had to find ways to speak around it. Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel “Maus,” which depicted the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats, allowed us to set aside, momentarily, the faces of the slaughtered and the survivors.

Likewise, director Jonathan Glazer’s devastating film “The Zone of Interest” doesn’t show us the death, doesn’t take us into the camps. Instead, and this is the movie’s insidious masterstroke, it shows the people just outside the walls, complicit in what’s happening inside.

The movie is based on Martin Amis’ novel, which fictionalized the story of the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. Glazer restores the real names to these characters, so we meet Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), an ambitious Nazi officer, being a good father to the children he and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), are raising just outside Auschwitz.

Hedwig works to care for her kids, including their baby, and tend to the house and garden. But any illusion that she doesn’t know what’s happening where her husband works is shattered early on, when a soldier brings a bundle of clothes and a fur coat. The servants go through the clothes, looking for a nice set of underwear, while Hedwig tries on the fur coat and looks at herself in the mirror. Then she puts her hand in a pocket, and finds a tube of lipstick — which she tries on to check the shade, then wipes off. In that brief moment, the audience sees clearly that she knows what happened to the former owner of this coat and lipstick.

When Rudolf is given a promotion, to be in charge of organizing all of Hitler’s death camps, Hedwig’s biggest concern is that she be allowed to keep the house by Auschwitz, on which she has worked so hard. The narrative then splits, with Hedwig working to ignore the smoke overhead while Rudolf is in Berlin, having meetings with other SS officers to put Auschwitz’ tactics in motion elsewhere.

Glazer’s script, and his antiseptic presentation of the Hösses’ deceptively tranquil home life, shows how easy it can be to put unpleasant thoughts out of one’s head if one’s comfort is at risk. The people shown here don’t think about the murders over the wall, because their way of life is conditioned on them not thinking about such things.

The one time Glazer’s camera enters the camp is the most chilling scene in “The Zone of Interest,” but not for the reasons one might suspect. Those scenes are a flash-forward, to the Auschwitz of today, preserved as a museum and historical monument — a reminder of what happened and can’t be allowed to happen again. Even here, though, Glazer shows it in the most mundane way possible, giving the audience the choice to consider the minor details to keep from facing the horrific whole truth.

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‘The Zone of Interest’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 26, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 105 minutes; in German, with subtitles.