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. 

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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. 

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5 min read

US election: the primal stories trumping facts

Projections and polls cannot capture the power of stories shaping identity.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a map depicts US states coloured red and blue.
538 election prediction map.
ABC News.

Washington D.C. — Election throes in America are intensifying while citizens prepare to cast their votes. The last week alone has been something like a whirlwind, not to mention the entire campaign itself. 

Last week, Americans tuned into the first and possibly final Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. On the heels of the debate came a flurry of propaganda leveled by JD Vance (and promoted by Trump) against Haitian migrant communities in Ohio. These claims resulted in bomb threats and school closures. 

And to wrap up the week, a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in nearly as many months. Trump and his campaign, quicker and more direct that the first attempt, quickly cast the blame towards Democrats, specifically for what they see as violent rhetoric in describing Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Trump meanwhile continues to campaign on threats and claims of election fraud, refusing to signal he’d accept the certified results of the election in the event he loses.  

That’s just another week in an unpredictable American presidential election. 

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle. 

And life goes on. For now, in this time, in my small corner of American life, I find there is this mixture of exhausted apathy and existential rage. In view of the spectacle, there’s a general exasperation of “what will happen next?” But more personally, dispersed on social media, is the existential zeal and dread—“we” have to defeat “them!”   

The danger of this mixture is twofold. Just as odd as it is potent. It is also combustible. And just as it can lay dormant; it can also be summoned by a mere spark.  

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle with predictions and projections. Some offer prayer. 

I listen in on conservative Christian talk radio. Prayers offered on air for God to intervene. What follows is a litany of slogans— “secure our borders” and “defend life” and “the economy” — and of course prayers for the salvation of those who think differently.  

Then, there’s more daring outrage merchants with deep pockets. Those who try to shift the election through nefarious means. Like the case of Tenet Media, a media network of right-wing American podcasters who were recently indicted by the Justice Department for receiving Russian funds through fronted companies.  

It seems to me that the heart of the matter in the midst of this election, deeper than policy and beyond the spectacle, is that none of us are entirely sure what reality another person inhabits.  

A new study published last week found that most registered Republicans (at 67 per cent) trust the Trump campaign as their primary source for election information. Trump’s word, for nearly three quarters of his party, is given more authority than government certification, media-based news, or local news. 

This raises the possibility that, in 50-some-odd days, if Trump refuses to concede, if he repeats claims of election fraud, his base seems ready and willing to believe it.  

Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning.

Alongside the debates about policy, the propaganda that stokes division and dehumanizes migrant communities, is a deeper crisis of source authority. Of not just “facts” but truth, of meaning, of reality. 

The study revealed that most Americans signal they tend to trust information that comes from “data” and “facts.” But oddly enough, nothing about that statement seems to accord with the on the ground reality of America’s social fabric.  

We should know by now: facts have never been enough.  

100 years ago, as novelist Rebecca West reflected on the chaotic series of events that sparked World War I, she admitted, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many.” 

 What seems “real” for many Americans is not (and perhaps has never been) rooted entirely in the all-powerful “fact.” Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning. These stories are primal. They’re the kind which create identities and bind communities. They are rich in meaning and so prove entirely immune to fact-checking operations. Source authority has no power apart from primal stories. And though projections and polls tend to focus on the data, they cannot capture the power of stories which create identity and contain community. This is the stuff the vote is made of, too. 

This past week, JD Vance defended his propaganda in the form of conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants eating pets by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”  

Ends-justifies-means has always been ascendant in politics. Nobody is arguing that MAGA invented political expediency. But this election is careening towards deep waters which we would do well to avoid. 

“Propaganda is a means to an end,” said Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1934 before an audience at Nuremberg, “…it provides the background music...[it] miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people.” 

I do not know what the next 50 days will hold. I remain deeply concerned that the word of Trump aspires to assume an authority which sees democracy as a meddling imposition in one man’s destiny. But I do know that none of this is fated. As Augustine observed during the throes of Rome’s collapse: “Bad times! Hard times!” this is what they are saying. But let us live well and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times. 

May it be so. 

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