The Zone of Interest’s peripheral vision of evil

Director Jonathan Glazer bests Spielberg thanks to a quality of attention.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

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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Yaroslav Walker

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4 min read

2025-09-10

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.

Review

Addiction

Culture

Theatre

24 June 2024

5 min read

The ancient drama of rehab

People Places & Things is a modern play with old stories.

Simon Walsh

Simon Walsh is a communications consultant, journalist and non-stipendiary priest in the Diocese of London.

on a stage a woman kneels on a bed amid frantic action around her.

Denise Gough as Emma.

‘There is no higher power,’ says a character defiantly in People Places & Things, the revival of Duncan Macmillan’s 2015 play about addicts and addiction. It’s an echo from Greek tragedy when anyone denies the gods, and now has a modern ring in all the self-help, self-belief talk of recovery and resolve.

Denise Gough reprises her lead performance as Emma for which, last time around, she swept the board in awards and nominations. It’s easy to see why. She’s on stage almost the entire time, compelling and fluent throughout. The opening scene has her in the white-box modern set wearing a Victorian costume, for her character is an actress in Chekhov’s The Seagull – almost meta, and the first hint and how this a show where realities and identities blur with layers upon layers.

Soon after, Emma (if that is her real name) checks into a rehab unit. She doesn’t feel she has a problem but is there for a break. ‘Drugs and alcohol have never let me down,’ she says at one point. A brisk female doctor in a white coat admits her, played by Sinéad Cusack. A couple of scenes later, Cusack reappears as the clinic’s group therapist. This time she’s full of empathy – barefoot and with a scarf over one shoulder – all herbal tea and sympathy.

But the therapist’s work with her charges is vital. Some even get to ‘graduate’ and host a non-alcoholic party the night before they leave, having successfully stayed the course. Probably not Emma though. She’s too feisty, individually unable to admit her problems, and inevitably she crashes. There’s a naturalistic feel to the production and narrative, even when it jolts into dream-like sequences or bright lights with thumping techno music.

Anyone with experience of an addict or addiction will find it all too familiar. The later scene where Emma returns to the parental home is a crucible of pain, and embodies the play’s title. It concerns ‘the people who can make us relapse, the places which trigger associations, and the things which are the props of the old habits’. And it’s made more complex by the family in grief over the recent, sudden death of Emma’s beloved brother in a freak accident. ‘It should have been you instead’ is the parental curse on this remaining child.

There’s a slow and silent feel to the way it develops. The word inexorable comes to mind, something that cannot be changed or stopped. Like Greek tragedy, the tension is in how this will resolve, and if it will turn out as badly as feared. It does and it doesn’t, which is at least true to the addiction journey.

Jeremy Herrin expertly directs an intensely fine cast: Russell Anthony, Holly Atkins, Ryan Hutton, Malachi Kirby, Danny Kirrane, Paksie Vernon, Kevin McMonagle, Ayò Owóyemi-Peters, Lousie Templeton, Dillon Scott-Lewis. These are nuanced, crafted performances which inhabit Bunny Christie’s versatile, stylish set with presence.

What the healings have in common is the aftermath – a sense of vision restored, stability refound, new clarity...

Faith plays at the edges of this work. There are passing references to religion: a ‘bibling grief’, communion wine, the power of prayer. More tears, said St Teresa of Avila, are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones, and this outward expression of a cry for help connotes the spiritual struggle of addicts along with their pity. As the first disciples themselves asked, ‘Teach us, Lord, how to pray.’

Addiction was not something Jesus had much to say about. Healings take place throughout each of the four gospels. The sufferers present with various ailments and of differing origins. For some it is hereditary, others through sin (such as when Matthew records Jesus healing a paralyzed man with the words ‘your sins are forgiven’). At other times there is a clear need for recognition such as when Jesus visits his hometown. He ‘laid hands on a few sick people and cured them’ but otherwise ‘could do no deed of power there… and was amazed at their unbelief’.

These healings, however, do not obviously deal with addiction. The closest connection is probably the examples which deal with demons. The encounter with a man possessed in the land of the Gerasenes, a little earlier, is instructive. Here is someone who ‘lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him anymore, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained but the chains he wrenched apart; and no one had the strength to subdue him’. But Jesus confronts the demon, the ’unclean spirit’, and sends it into a herd of swine ‘numbering about two thousand, which then rushes to the sea and is drowned.

What the healings have in common is the aftermath – a sense of vision restored, stability refound, new clarity. The healed demoniac is found with Jesus, ‘sitting there, clothed and in his right mind’, though the swineherds do not believe it and remain scared. They beg Jesus to leave and the ex-demoniac wants to go with him, but Jesus tells him to stay: ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ He is to give his testimony.

Drama at its heart has to be about telling a story and finding a universal truth.

It’s a running debate that lived experience and life identity are now more important than acting ability when it comes to race, sexuality, gender and so on. Denise Gough has given testimony ahead of this run – how as a teenager she fled her native Wexford for London where she fell into homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and was the victim of grooming. She has told her story, with purpose, much as those people who experienced healing and deliverance gave their own account to the Early Church.

Drama at its heart has to be about telling a story and finding a universal truth. The gospels are full of this, with redemption and rehabilitation. Lives changed, sins forgiven, and a new future made possible. There is power in believing, and knowing that when someone might stumble and fall, it is not the end. In fact, it might just be the beginning.

People, Places & Things is on at the Trafalgar Theatre, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2DY, until 10 August 2024.