Review
Culture
Film & TV
4 min read

The Zone of Interest’s peripheral vision of evil

Director Jonathan Glazer bests Spielberg thanks to a quality of attention.
in an immaculate garden a family play in and around a small swimming pool. Beyond the garden wall, a barracks is visble with crematorium smoke rising beyond it.
The Höss family at play at their Auschwitz home.

This has been a tremendously difficult review to write. I’ve written and re-written this review for two weeks now. You will see why. 

The Zone of Interest begins idyllically. A family is picnicking by a lake. The men swim, the women pick berries in the woods. It's a gorgeous sunny day. The family happily drive home down an evocatively headlamp-lit country road. The father walks through their palatial house, turning off every light. The next morning the family are gathered outside to give the father his birthday present: a canoe. Two boys lead their blindfolded father gently down the steps from the house to the garden. The garden is magnificent: filled with flowers and immaculately kempt. 

The father is wearing an SS uniform. The camera pans round the garden. Behind the garden wall you see glimpses of barbed wire, belching chimneys, rows of dormitories. You hear shouts, moans, cries, gunshots. This is no ordinary house, no ordinary garden, no ordinary family. This is the home of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their five children. This is Auschwitz. Höss runs it. Hedwig runs their beautiful home. The children run around. That is the next 100 minutes of film. It's a realist family drama from the 1940s. The children are children, the wife is house-proud to a fault, and the husband is hard-working, ambitious, and keen to do a good job. I don’t want to say much more. You simply need to go and see the film. 

When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil it was controversial. Many commentators misunderstood or misrepresented her point. Evil acts - especially an evil act as totemic as the Holocaust - are not ‘banal’. The people who commit evil on such a scale often can be. A genocidal machine of such scale and complexity needs a tremendous number of cogs… they can’t all be murderous sociopaths. Eichmann was banal in himself - he was of average intelligence, uncreative in his thinking, a follower of fads and joiner of organisations. 

This is exactly how Rudolf and Hedwig are presented. Christian Friedel plays Höss with an almost continual ambience of low-level boredom. Pillow-talk with his wife, reading to his children, a discussion about the most efficient way to incinerate the Jews in his camp, is all spoken with roughly the same expression and tone. He clearly wants to do well in his work, but it doesn’t matter what the work is. Sandra Hüller gives Hedwig a marvelous, slightly nervous energy. She always seems to be keeping a combination of grasping envy and slimy smugness just barely contained beneath the surface of her features. She can’t think of much beyond the order of her house, the beauty of her garden, and her status among other SS wives. Their quality of attention is essentially absent.  

Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it. 

Not to be flippant, but they would be dreadful dinner-party guests, and not just because they are Nazis: they seemingly have no capacity for a thought that goes beyond themselves, and their immediate environment, and their immediate needs and wants. They are banal. 

Between them Jonathan Glazer (director), Łukasz Żal (cinematographer), and Mica Levi (musician) give a remarkable demonstration of the power of restraint. The camerawork is naturalistic and almost never showy. The performers look like they were given the latitude simply to be in the scene: no over-direction. The soundscape is hauntingly bare. There is little music or sound beyond the ambient. The mood is, of course, set by the fact that the ambient sounds are roaring furnaces, gunshots, and desperate screaming. The film does not attempt to make a point or demand a response; Glazer simply gives you a slice of domestic life that just happens to be located next door to a death-camp. 

Steven Spielberg has suggested this is the best film tackling the dreadful subject of the Holocaust since Schindler's List. He is wrong. The Zone of Interest is a far superior film. I love Spielberg, but Schindler's List is offensively bad. It takes a subject of such abject depravity and then tries to emotionally manipulate you into feeling bad: the music, the speeches, the more-is-more approach to showing you the pinnacle of human cruelty. Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it.  As Augustine says, evil is nothing in itself. Evil is the corruption and annihilation of what is good and lovely. Evil isn’t some great monster that forever battles with God. God is good…no…God is Good. So evil is literally nothing - goodness in decay to nothingness.  

Glazer, whether intentionally or not, recognises this theological truth. Looking at the full abyssal nothingness of evil is beyond human comprehension. But if you see it in the periphery, then you see it. When you hear the screams of the innocent and at the same time see a woman cheerfully ignore them while she plays in a flowerbed with her infant daughter, then you recognise the potential for human depravity. You can’t truly encounter the nothingness of evil, and the dangers of letting its parasitical and destructive hunger spread, until you’ve watched others ignore it without missing a beat. I’ve never cried while watching Schindler's List. I cried while watching The Zone of Interest. Twice. 

Glazer et al have done the world a great service with this film. They’ve reminded us that the weapon against evil is the rejection of empty banality. Banality is loving yourself. To reject banality is to embrace a quality of attention that is truly outward looking. Rejecting banality is loving your neighbour as yourself. 

Explainer
Creed
Death & life
Monsters
Paganism
5 min read

Will the owner of ‘Halloween’ please come and collect it?

A mutant festival of saints, spirits, and supermarket costumes resists belonging to anyone
A witch, a priest and a druid stand in a store and look quizzically towards a halloween pumpkin
Nick Jones, Midjourney.ai

The trouble with modern Halloween is that it’s hard to say who it really belongs to. Our contemporary public holiday – 31 October, when people dress up as skeletons, light jack-o-lanterns, and go ‘trick-or-treating’ – has a few prospective owners.  

Perhaps Christians could claim it. The term “Halloween” is a shortening of ‘All Hallow’s Eve’, which is the day before All Saint’s Day (1 November) in the Church calendar.  

But this doesn’t fit with a few things. Don’t Christians dislike all that dressing up as evil spirits, and summoning up misrule and revelry? Instead, the case is made for a pagan ownership of Halloween: it was all due to a Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced ‘sow-in’). This was a day for appeasing evil spirits, contacting the dead, and acts of mischief – all better fits for modern Halloween, surely? 

Sadly, we just don’t know enough about Samhain to say. We only have evidence about it from centuries after the Christian era, and in limited scraps like: “Samhain, when the summer goes to its rest”. It is unlikely the Christians invented this, to be sure – but none of the data tells us how it was celebrated.  

In fact, there is no evidence at all that All Saints Day was a churchy attempt to ‘take over’ a pre-existing pagan festival. From the get-go, Christians commemorated their dead on the basis that they were still alive in heaven, and able to bring prayers to God. A quick peek at the Book of Revelation (the final book of the Bible) gives a behind-the-curtain look: “and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel”.  

Over time, it became more official which ‘holy ones’, or saints, should be honoured at which times. This was not about making dead Christians into gods, though. A famous theologian called St Augustine explains the proper view of the early Christians as they kept hold of bones and clothing from their dead: “We do not build temples, and ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices for these same martyrs; for they are not our gods, but their God is our God”.  

Gradually, a date was set to celebrate all those great men and women in heaven – from this came All Saints, or All Hallows Day. A tradition in northern Europe set this on the 1 November: “As a jewel worn on the brow sparkles time and again, so November at its beginning is resplendent with the praise given to all the saints” reports an English calendar from around 800AD.  

It is all well and good celebrating those who have made it to heaven. But what about the majority of Christians? Those who had died unrepentant and lukewarm – what on earth could be done for them? Here came another separate development: offering prayers and worship on behalf of those who had died as forgiven sinners, but who were still, if you like, serving their time for their bad choices.  

It gradually became the norm to tack that practice onto the pre-existing All Saints Day, so that the souls of regular Joes could have powerful heavenly intercessors close by. And so, All Souls Day became an established part of the Church’s year too, falling on 2 November.  

 

But here’s the twist. This season of ‘Hallowtide’ (All Saints and All Souls together) carried on for centuries, until England suddenly and violently abandoned it all in the sixteenth century. Seemingly overnight, the Reformations of the Tudor monarchs ended All Souls Day by scrapping all mention of a purgatory for the dead, and attempts to pray for them there. All Saints Day limped on in the new Established Religion as a remembrance of Christian exemplars – but they were not to be thought of as in radio contact from heaven anymore.  

Some people tried to carry on as usual, in illicit gatherings on hilltops, where they would burn straw, and gather to ask for help from great saints and pray for loved ones. But the majority followed the new religious settlement and tried to forge new communal rituals as best they could. The night still had a ‘supernatural’ afterglow thanks to centuries of the now-absent All Saints and All Souls. 

Then, in the nineteenth century, there was a comeback. Irish immigration to the USA and Great Britain plonked a fully formed Hallowtide into English-speaking culture again. It took like a duck to water. Perhaps this was to be expected. Here was a civilisation which had been rapidly deprived of its ordinary way of expressing connection to their deceased loved ones, as well as a sense of protection from heavenly guardians. They were clearly starving for some way to communicate feelings about ‘the beyond’, and to find hope in the darkening, colder days.  

‘Halloween’, really a modern döppleganger of All Hallow’s Eve, quickly became a popular national custom – a world custom, indeed, due to US influence. It took from Christianity that otherwordly atmosphere – but it did not jettison any of the customs that had arisen since the Reformation, and which were themselves continuations of folky responses to the coming of Winter; Samhain is almost certainly a part of that background here, even if it is not a direct connection, as we have seen. 

This Halloween mystery has a twist, then. Here is really a mutant of a festival that belongs to no one in particular - and that is the point. One could really call it one of modern pluralistic society’s great achievements. It has taken over management of this eerie season from the church, and arguably made a successful shared custom out of it. On the other hand, it is arguably consumeristic, tacky and frequently immoral: it was only a few years ago that supermarket costumes allowing people to dress as ‘mentally ill’ showcased this shallowness. 

So, as a Christian, I have some regrets that Christianity does not really ‘own’ modern Halloween, anymore. Because the original All Hallows, as well as All Souls, seem to me to be a historic high point of confidence about our human fate. Here was a whole civilisation that seemed to announce to itself, every November, that death, human wickedness, and the Devil, were not in charge here – those who had died in Christ were now more fully alive; that no one is so beyond hope that they are not worth praying for. The darkening nights and colder air must have seemed less daunting to them.  

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