You won’t see a more meticulously made film this year than The Zone of Interest — or a more disquieting one. Jonathan Glazer’s Auschwitz family drama is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, but that’s the only loose thing about it. The British director took almost a decade to research and re-enact the story of Rudolf Höss, the SS officer and then the longest-serving commandant of the concentration camp in occupied Poland where more than a million were killed.
Glazer’s film — winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, nominated for nine Baftas and five Oscars, including best director and adapted screenplay, which Glazer also wrote — was shot at Auschwitz but never shows the camp itself, playing out entirely on the other side of the wall, where Höss (Christian Friedel) lives comfortably with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five young children in a stucco villa with a charming garden and a swimming pool with slide. “We have everything we could ever want on our doorstep!” Hedwig says, giving her mother a tour of the garden. “The Jews are over the other side of the wall.”
This is the first film in ten years from Glazer, who has graduated from that Guinness ad with the horses to become one of the most revered directors in the world. The Londoner has made only four films in 23 years but all are extraordinary, from Sexy Beast (2000) with Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone to Birth (2004) starring Nicole Kidman, and Under the Skin (2013) with Scarlett Johansson. “When I do make one,” Glazer said recently, “I tend to be very, very dedicated to that project until it’s finished.” Especially when it’s on a subject this enormous.
They filmed a short walk from where the Höss family had lived, building a replica of the house and garden and filling them with hidden cameras and microphones — “Nazis in the Big Brother house,” as Glazer put it. It is forbidden to shoot drama films inside the actual camp for moral reasons, says Piotr Cywiński, a Polish historian who has been the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum since 2006. “It was a place of mass murder.”
“Nazis in the Big Brother house,” as Glazer put it.
Yet Cywiński allowed Glazer to film nearby, satisfied that he was committed to credibility. This was not the place to be cavalier, The Crown-style, with the facts. “For us, historical accuracy is essential,” Cywiński says. “But I’ve never seen filmmakers who are so obsessed with being absolutely authentic.” Glazer’s team worked for three years with historians at the museum, poring over archives and survivors’ testimonies. “They asked about every detail. We received I don’t know how many hundreds of emails from them.
“What impressed me about the portrayal of Höss was his double life,” Cywiński continues. “He had a completely different attitude to home and work, and the testimonies show this.” One moment the commandant is reading his kids a bedtime story, the next he is discussing the introduction of new ovens that can dispose of hundreds of extra corpses an hour. Hedwig tries on a fur coat and her children play with gold teeth, both taken from dead prisoners. There is plenty of evidence this all happened; so too that ashes from the camp’s ovens were used to fertilize Hedwig’s flower beds or dumped in the nearby river, as we also see in the film — one of the Höss children finds a human bone during a fishing trip. The most powerful moment for Cywiński was when a man comes to the house to clean Höss’s shoes. “He’s afraid, he tries not to be visible, he does it very quickly. It shows the prisoners’ dehumanization.”
Although we don’t see the horror in the camp, we hear it: rumbling machinery, gunshots, cries of pain. “Jonathan said there will be two films: the one you see and the one you hear,” says Johnnie Burn, the sound designer, who is also nominated for an Oscar. He compiled recordings of how the site would have sounded at that time: birds and bees, planes and cars, guards and prisoners. When Hans Höss hears his father, Rudolf, outside on a horse, Friedel was actually on a horse for the sound recording, even though it was never filmed with a camera. “The production company and insurance people were like, ‘Do you really need him on a horse?’ ” Burn recalls, speaking at a post-screening Q&A. “But it affects the diaphragm. Perhaps in a more obvious dramatization film that would have been fine but here anything that was remotely wooden really stuck out.”
There are some chilling edits: a scene in which Hedwig asks her husband to bring her back a present from a work trip (“chocolate, if you see it”) cuts to a shot of Rudolf waiting for a train of prisoners. “We knew that at that time, at that specific date, the trains that came were mostly from France so we had French voices,” Burn says. He and his team recorded some of them at the Paris riots, and for the guards they went to football matches in rural Germany to capture “young men shouting aggressively”.
Burn spent a distressing amount of time perfecting the sounds of violence. “When you hear multiple gunshots, those are the executions at Block 11, which was about 150m down the road from the camp, and so that’s how we recorded that sound — in an echoey concrete space at that distance,” he says. For the prisoners’ cries, “we listened to real sounds of people in pain, YouTube recordings and things like that”. Actors feigning pain tend to tail off, Burn says. “They go ‘Aaaaah’ like they’re falling down a well, but people who are actually dying have more of a continuous pitch.” You feel for him, having to dwell on this stuff for so long.
As you feel for the German actors Friedel, 44, and Hüller, 45, playing the monstrous, blithe central couple for three months. “They were masters of self-deception — they ignored the smell, the noise,” Friedel says. “When I watched the movie for the first time I was really uncomfortable. I had the feeling, ‘Oh God, in some situations this could be me.’ ” He was shocked to hear the same thing from a Jewish person who saw the film. “This darkness exists in all of us.”
Hüller wouldn’t go that far. “I don’t feel that I could be [Hedwig].” Like many of us she “cuts out the horror that’s happening next door”, she says, meaning the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. “Which is sort of what [the Hösses] do.” Nominated for a Bafta for this film as well as for Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller thinks “it would feel weird to me to say it was really hard playing a Nazi. It’s not hard at all — you just have to not feel anything. That’s the most dangerous thing about it.”
We don’t see the horror in the camp, we hear it: rumbling machinery, gunshots, cries of pain.
In one scene Hedwig starts crying when Rudolf tells her he has been posted elsewhere. “They’d have to drag me out of here,” she says. Even that conversation was based on testimony given by the couple’s gardener, who overheard them.
The historical rigor of the German and Polish-language film gave the actors a contrasting freedom, the hidden cameras and lack of crew intrusion allowing for long naturalistic takes and improvisation. “It didn’t feel like I was playing a character in the normal way,” Hüller says. “I was a part of an experiment.” Not having carefully set-up, aesthetically pleasing camera shots was liberating. “Who wants to play such a woman and then think about what she looks like in a certain light? There was no chance of it being glamorous.”
They never took the job lightly, Hüller says. “We had constant conversations about whether this was the right way of doing things.” Unlike the crew, they didn’t research their characters exhaustively. “Hedwig was at the camp and she knew what was going on — that was all the information I needed,” Hüller explains. She did listen to a recording of Hedwig when she gave witness testimony at a war trial. In a bid for leniency “she pretended to be a little girl with this high voice. Since we were not making a biopic, which would have been sort of disgusting because it’s always glorifying people in a way, I didn’t do any further research.”
How did Friedel play a man culpable for the deaths of more than a million? “Jonathan said to me, ‘Keep this darkness always in your mind, but don’t show me.’ That was really an intense cocktail. After the shoot for the first time in my life I had a panic attack.” While the film leaves the family in their wartime clover, after Germany’s surrender they fled, Höss posing as a gardener. They were tracked down by the Nazi hunter Hanns Alexander and Höss was tried at Nuremberg and hanged at Auschwitz in 1947. Hedwig died in 1989 while visiting her daughter Brigitte, who had moved to America. In 2013 Brigitte described her father in an interview as “the nicest man in the world”.
There is a chink of light in the film: a local girl working at the Höss house steals apples and hides them for prisoners. That’s a true story, told to Glazer by the girl, Aleksandra Bystron-Kolodziejczyk, who by then was in her nineties.
For Cywiński, though, there isn’t much respite. He has worked at Auschwitz every week for 17 years. “The majority of my co-workers leave after two or three months,” he says. “It’s even more difficult as time goes by, as you get to know more and more. But I have to continue.”
Ed Potton writes about film, music, and the arts. He also co-presents a weekly film show for The Times of London