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. 

Article
Atheism
Belief
Creed
4 min read

Atheism discovers Christianity — just not the inconvenient bits

When sceptics start praising faith for its vibes and values, you know the secular ship is taking on water

Jonah Horne is a priest, living and working in Devon.

A spotlit round table with podcast guests around it.
Steve Bartlett and guests discuss belief.
Diary of a CEO.

Atheism in the age of authenticity and self-expressive secularism is inherently cannibalistic. I’m not suggesting that Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are losing their minds and devouring one another. But what I am proposing is that atheism, held within today’s philosophical waters, cannot not affirm the thing it so vehemently denies: faith. 
There’s a fascinating moment in a round table conversation with Steven Bartlett (Diary of a CEO) and Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Skeptic). The former presents a case of his friend whose life is radically changed when he becomes a Christian. In some senses it’s a classic despair to hope story. Bartlett concludes by asking O’Connor “what would you say to this friend?” The answer that follows flawed me. O’Conor, an ardent atheist, responds by essentially saying “if these things work, then I’d encourage him to continue doing them.” 
In a similar vein, last year Richard Dawkins professed his faith in cultural Christianity. Dawkin’s well documented and fresh alignment with Christianity is accordingly founded upon its ‘fundamental decency.’ Which just to be clear, according to the biologist, is very unlike Islam. Sadly, his newfound respect hasn’t prohibited New Atheism’s inherent Islamaphobia, it just seems to be masquerading in more sympathetic clothing. 
Amongst these stories and other examples there seems to be a resurgence, or at least a growing respect, in Christian religion and faith. This can also be seen in church attendance and statistics around those professing faith. And whilst Dawkin’s move away from religious degradation towards cultural affirmation can, in some senses, be welcomed; there is an inherent flaw in both his and O’Connor’s perspectives when held in light of Christianity’s central claims. 
For O’Connor, Christianity is seemingly commendable if it leads to self-actualisation, self- fulfilment and a privatised sense of hope. From O’Connor’s atheistic vantage point, the goal of the human is self-actualisation. When confronted by Christianity as a means of this fulfilment, his philosophical stance begins to eat itself. Similarly, for Dawkins, Christianity is a useful tool for the construction and preservation of Western societies. As our country goes through rapid change and our cities exponentially expand in size and multiculturalism Dawkins finds himself affirming the faith he so enthusiastically mocked as a means of security. His atheism inevitably eats itself. 
Whilst different, Christianity in both of these cases is used as a crutch. The faith becomes a prop either for societal betterment or self-fulfilment: it is a reductive perspective that views Christianity as the best truth amongst other truths on offer. It approaches religion as a pick-n-mix sweet shop, with Christianity currently the best flavour. 
However, for Christians, their faith is not a truth amongst other truths, it is the truth. It is not primarily reasoned, discovered or affirmed upon positive reviews but is fundamentally revealed to us and encouraged by a Triune God of love. Reason, positive societal change and personal fulfilment are not bad things in of themselves but when approaching Jesus, they are utterly secondary. This revelation, when fully recognised, reveals O’Connor and Dawkin’s understandings of Christianity as inherently stunted. For O’Connor his affirmation of faith, when positively leading to self-actualisation, would struggle to reckon with St. Stephen’s death found in the book of Acts. The first Christian martyr pleaded for God’s mercy upon his murderers as they launched stones at him. His faith led to incredible courage in the face of intense violence but I’m not entirely sure you could say it led to a widely accepted notion of self-actualisation. For Dawkin’s his affirmation, of Christianity as a pillar for society, should be held in light of the early church’s teachings on radical hospitality, their startling financial generosity and the faith’s ongoing care for the alien or foreigner. This, I would contend, would unsettle the biologist’s divorce of culture and faith. 
The challenge for Christians when confronted by seemingly positive reactions from historically antagonistic voices is to refuse the subtle domestication of the ancient faith. I appreciate O’Connor’s openness to the Christianity and I commend Dawkin’s softening tone. However, their self-defeating and cannibalistic atheism can only affirm Christianity as crutch for their own agendas. They concede defeat but on their own terms. Their vision accepts a partial understanding of following Jesus, an understanding that has been moderated and regulated to fit into their preconceived philosophical and societal agendas. However, for Christians, Jesus is not someone who affirms our predetermined frameworks but instead devastates our self-obsessive tendencies and overwhelms our insecurities with a profound love best revealed in his life, death and resurrection. This realisation is ultimately revealed to us, not on our terms but received freely as a gift. It is given, not grasped or owned, but received

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