The Zone of Interest

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the tour our guide asked if anyone had seen The Zone of Interest, then pointed to the Höss family house beyond the fence. My blood ran cold. How can a tidy garden and a children’s bedroom feel more horrifying when the gas chambers are a short walk away? Precisely because they’re ordinary. A family home where life carried on as usual while, the other side of the wall, the machinery of genocide ran at full tilt.

Glazer’s film understands that banality can be the sharpest blade. Remote cameras observe without nudging; the performances are enclosed, domestic, almost clipped. Dialogue is sparse, but the sound design never stops—dogs, trains, a furnace’s low growl—an off-screen chorus that fills your head with what the pictures refuse to show. The production design is immaculate in the most chilling way: crisp laundry, polished boots, and a garden that’s forever being improved.

I first saw it in the cinema; the audience didn’t move when the credits ended and the lights came up. Rewatching after Auschwitz, the film felt even more exacting. The Zone of Interest isn’t about what you look at but what you live beside—and choose not to see. It leaves you pinned to your seat, listening to noise that will not be quiet, long after the screen goes black.