The Zone of Interest: Understating Auschwitz (film review)

The Zone of Interest has to be the most original Holocaust film ever made: no filthy cattle trains, no emaciated bodies, no yellow stars, no gas chambers. The only portrayal of pain is an SS officer feeling unwell and retching at the end.

The film focuses on the family life and routine duties of the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. The only signs that we are in a death camp are distant chimneys, ashes briefly falling from the sky into a river, and stylised shots of steam trains.

All films on the subject have a didactic purpose: lest we forget, here is what happened, in all its horror. The Zone of Interest takes the opposite approach: its eloquence lies in what it does not show.

Opting for ellipsis as a narrative technique is a remarkable choice — perhaps the only true choice one after the facts have been established. There is no longer any need to explain. A few throwaway allusions — a sales pitch for a new furnace, a stylish fur coat taken from an inmate — are enough.

The actors are splendid. Sandra Hüller, who plays the commandant’s wife, conveys callousness just by way she walks. Christian Friedel not only looks like Höss: his every expression exudes the stunted emotional life that pervades his autobiography, Commandant of Auschwitz (written while awaiting his execution in 1947).

Neither speaks much. As a 20th-century philosopher put it, Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.