The Zone of Interest is among the most audacious movies of last year — a radical experiment in perspective, limiting the audience’s vantage on atrocities while adopting that of the people perpetrating them. But it’s not exactly an ambiguous experiment, is it? Jonathan Glazer establishes his formal conceit immediately, pushing all the horrors of Auschwitz just beyond the frame line and focusing instead on a blissfully unperturbed Nazi family going about its daily routines in the periphery of the camp. Because the director never much deviates from this approach, his point about society’s ability to compartmentalize evil — and keep its own complicity out of sight and mind — comes through much louder and clearer than the offscreen screams on the soundtrack. It’s a movie that keeps saying one discomforting thing over and over again, which may be why so many reviewers referenced the same Hannah Arendt quote about the banality of evil, inspired by studying a Nazi bureaucrat whose monstrous deeds clashed with how ordinary he seemed.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a film refusing to obscure its meaning, especially when that meaning is so timelessly relevant. But after two hours of variation on a stylistic schema as rigid as fascist protocol, there is something particularly powerful about the way The Zone of Interest finally takes a big left turn in its final scene — a rupture in time and space that violates the movie’s strategic tunnel vision, catching a glimmer of dawning awareness at the end of said tunnel. If the rest of Zone remains difficult to misread, its ending is flush with interpretive possibilities, an enigmatic ellipsis.
The film’s last few minutes take place in Berlin, far from the concentration camp Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) oversaw, and far from his family, still living in the perfect dream house they built next door. Höss has left a celebration — a kind of Nazi office party, as disturbingly mundane as any corporate holiday shindig — thrown in honor of a heinous new plan of his devising, a mass-extermination operation. After bragging to his wife over the phone, the officer hangs up, leaves his office, and wanders the darkened government building. Suddenly, he is overcome with the urge to vomit on the stairs. And as he stumbles onto a new floor, a vision of the future greets him from the end of the long, cavernous hallway: a glimpse into the Auschwitz of today, now a museum commemorating all of his victims.
The popular and maybe even intended reading of this ending is that Höss is finally confronted with the enormity of his prominent role in Hitler’s Final Solution. He retches because the ugly truth has, in the terrible quiet and darkness, found him. If only for a moment, his sociopathic disassociation has faltered. Discussing the film in a recent interview, Friedel seemed to reinforce that interpretation. “I think it’s a fight: body against his soul,” the actor said of Höss’s sudden sickness. “Because the body tells the truth and our mind, we can betray ourselves. We are masters of self-deception.” Friedel also points to a relevant source of inspiration for him and Glazer: the final scene of the documentary The Act of Killing, in which a war criminal — the genocidal Indonesian gangster Anwar Congo — also breaks into a fit of retching, as if finally overcome by what he’s done.
Still, it’s worth mentioning that there’s an alternative way to read the end of that movie. What if Congo, an avowed movie buff who sometimes modeled his murders on action and crime films, was performing a moral awakening for the cameras? What if his remorse was as calculated as his gangster swagger? To similar ends, Höss may be experiencing a different kind of rude awakening in The Zone of Interest — not so much the belated emergence of a conscience as the realization of how small he is in the grand scheme of things.
It’s not as though Glazer paints a clear portrait of moral culpability asserting itself. For starters, the retching happens before the vision, which complicates any clean-cut sense of cause and psychological effect. Is Höss feeling physical shockwaves of the truth his premonition will further illustrate — the telltale internal signs that he’s on the far wrong side of history? Or did he just drink too much at the party? Flopping the order of events denies the simple dramatic optics of an unapologetic war criminal feeling a pang of regret. It’s notable that the movie ends in 1943, a full two years before Germany surrendered. The real-life Höss did not have an Oskar Schindler moment. He kept serving Hitler’s vision and was unrepentant until a few days before his execution. An American psychologist who spoke with Höss wrote this of him: “There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse.”
So if it’s not guilt that presses upon the character in the final minutes, unsettling his stomach and mind, what does? Perhaps something smaller and pettier. The Zone of Interest presents Höss as a decidedly bureaucratic monster: the mass murderer as wormy careerist who sees the Holocaust — this unfathomable evil he’s directly committing — as a mere professional accomplishment. Researching the role, Friedel found a quote from the real commandant: “It was my job, and I want to be the best at my job.” Höss, in other words, wasn’t just “following orders,” the default defense of the average Nazi. He was trying to follow them really well, to get a gold star.
And so maybe what he’s seeing at the end of the hall is a future where no one appreciates what he’s done — not the technological ingenuity of his murders, not how efficiently the camp operated under his leadership. It’s his victims that people will come to Auschwitz to honor. He is a footnote on history, remembered as a mere cog of the death machine, if he’s remembered at all. It’s not incidental that the last dialogue the character delivers is some gloating about how they’re going to name a future act of genocide after him. He is a man chiefly concerned with his professional reputation. The irrelevance of that in historical hindsight is what turns his stomach.
In a way, that brief vignette that Glazer jumps to — an observational, miniature quasi-documentary of janitors cleaning what used to be a concentration camp and is now a museum — reflects the character’s blinkered thinking, even as it offers a deliberate break from it. Auschwitz is still a workplace. The custodians we see calmly dust its surfaces are doing a job, just as Höss was. If there’s any correlation between his belly ache and the vision that follows, it probably lies in his realization that he’s something of a custodian himself. The ending is like a monstrous distortion of the workaholic’s nightmare. His labor will not be celebrated. His Employee of the Month certificate will come down. In the end, The Zone of Interest remains the story of genocide as a Q3 project, a line on a middle manager’s résumé. Even as Glazer cuts away, he keeps that disturbing framework in place.
That said, the ending also reaches past Höss’s specific complicity, to the barriers the whole world puts up between itself and the unspeakable. It’s easier, that final cutaway says, to call out evil in hindsight — to see it as something that once happened, a dark history we can study behind glass, a horror that can be mourned but no longer prevented. But the evil of the Holocaust isn’t a strictly past-tense problem. It plays out in new forms all the time, ignored and condoned as we speak. Tomorrow’s sobering memorials are today’s atrocities happening just over the garden wall.
Related
