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.

Rory Stewart’s search for the hero inside

Yaroslav Walker

Who could be heroes today?

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.

Essay

Culture

Identity

29 May 2024

8 min read

Roll on AI, you'll make us more human

I’m not necessarily stupidly optimistic about AI, but there’s a tentative case to be so.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

An AI-generated image of a man folding a paper plan in a relaxed lounger, around him are creative tools and screens giving status updates are visible.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

I still come across people who insist that there are simply things that AI (artificial intelligence) can’t and will never be able to do. Humans will always have an edge. They tend to be journalists or editors who will insist that ChatGPT’s got nothing on their persuasive intentionality and honed command of nuance, wit, and word play. Of course, machines can replace the humans at supermarket check-out tills but not them. What they do is far too complex and requires such emotional precision and incisive insight into the audience psyche. Okay then. I nod, rolling my eyes into the back of my head.

At this point, it’s just naive to put a limiter on the capabilities of what AI can do. It’s not even been two years since ChatGPT3 was released into the wild and started this whole furore. It’s only been 18 months and OpenAI have just launched ChatGPT4 which can produce a whole persona who can listen, look, and talk back in such a natural and convincing voice that it may as well be a scene from the 2013 film, Her. A future where Joachim Phoenix falls in love with the sultry AI voice of Scarlet Johannsson doesn’t seem too far off. We have been terrible at predicting the speed at which generative AI has developed. AI video generation was one of the clearest examples of that in the last year. In 2023, we were lauding it over the AI models for generating this surreal, nightmarish scene of Will Smith eating spaghetti. “Silly AI! aren’t you cute.” we said. We swallowed our words earlier this year, when Open AI came out with Sora, their video generation model, which spat out photorealistic film trailers that would feel at home on the screens of Cannes.

There might be limits, but that ‘might’ gets smaller and smaller every single month, and we’re probably better off presuming that there is no ‘might’. We’ll be in for less surprises if we live from the presumption that there will be AIs that will make better newspaper editors, diagnostic radiologists, children’s book writers, and art-directors than most, if not all, humans.

With the mass reproduction and generation capabilities of AI, we may recognise that we crave the human touch not because it’s better but because it’s human.

I promised you a “stupidly optimising” take on this. So far, I’ve given you nothing but the bleak dystopian future where the labour market collapses and humans are dispossessed of all our technical, editorial, and creative skills. Where’s the good news?

Well, the stupidly optimistic take is this: the dispossession of all our human faculties by AI will force us to embrace the truest and most fundamental core of what makes us valuable - nothing other than simply our humanity. The value of humanity goes up if we presume that everything can be done better by AI.

In 1936, the German art critic, Walter Benjamin, prophesied the apocalyptic collapse of the art market in the essay: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It was at a time when photographic reproduction of paintings was becoming a mainstream technique and visitors to a gallery could buy a print of their favourite painting. He argued that the mass reproduction of paintings would devalue the original painting by stripping away the aura of work - its unique presence in space and cultural heritage; the je ne sais quoi of art that draws us to a place of encounter with it. Benjamin would gawp at the digital age where masterpieces would be reduced to default iPhone background screens, but he would also be surprised by the exponentially greater value the art market has placed on the original piece. The aura of the original is sought after, all the more, precisely because mechanical reproduction has become so cheap. Why? Because in a world of mass reproduction, we crave human authenticity and connection. With the mass reproduction and generation capabilities of AI, we may recognise that we crave the human touch not because it’s better but because it’s human. And for no other reason.

We continually place our identities in whatever talents we think make us uniquely worthwhile and value-creating for the world.

What are we to make of the AI trials happening in the NHS which spot cancer at rates significantly higher than any human doctor. The Royal College of Radiologists insists that “There is no question that real-life clinical radiologists are essential and irreplaceable”. But really? Apart from checking the AI’s work, what’s the “essential” and “irreplaceable” part? Well, it’s the human part. Somebody must deliver the bad news to the patient and that sure as hell shouldn’t be an AI. Even if an AI could emulate the trembling voice and calming tone of the most empathic consultant, it is the human-to-human interpersonal exchange that creates the space for grief, sorrow, and shock.

Think utopian with me for a moment. (I know, very counter-intuitive for us). In a society where all our technical skills are superseded, the most valuable skills that a human could possess might be the interpersonal ones. Empathy, compassion, intentionality, love even! The midwife who can hold the hand of a suffering first-time mother could be a more respected member of society than the editor of an edgy magazine or newspaper. As they should be! That’s a tantalising and stupidly optimistic vision of an AI future, but it’s a vision that aligns with what we know to be the true about ourselves. In our personal and spiritual lives, we already recognise that the most valuable aspects of our lives are our human relationships and the state of our inner selves. People on their death beds reflect on what kind of person they’ve been and reach out for the hands of their loved ones - not for their Q4, 2011 balance sheet. Our identities are shaped most deeply by our relationships and our character, and yet, we continually place our identities in whatever talents we think make us uniquely worthwhile and value-creating for the world. It’s good to create value, it’s nice to be good at something, and it’s meaningful to leave a lasting impact, but it is delusional to think that those things make us valuable. Our dispossession by AI might be the dispelling of these delusions!

In a few decades, there may be nothing that humans can do better than AI, other than simply being human in the world.

At least on a philosophical and spiritual level, being stripped of our human exceptionalism might be the most liberating experience for a society that has devalued and instrumentalised humanity to being glorified calculators. Being dispossessed is the truest thing about all of us. We are all being dispossessed daily by the slow march of time. The truest thing about us is that we will, one day, be wholly dispossessed by death itself. That was Heidegger’s fundamental insight into the human condition and this feeling of dispossession is the root of our anxiety and fear in the world. This might be part of the anxiety and ick we feel towards AI. Being dispossessed of our creativity and technical ability is a kind of violence and death against ourselves which we rage against. We can rage against it politically, socially, and economically, but there might be something helpful about resisting the rage from a psychological and spiritual point of view. Experiencing this dispossession might be the key to unlocking an authentic human existence in a world that we can’t control.

I believe in human creativity. I believe that what we make is valuable. I believe in the mesmerising aura of art, cinema, music, and every other beautiful thing that we get up to in the world. I believe in the unique connection between artist and audience and the power of blood, sweat, and tears. I believe in the beautiful and tortuous self-violence of creativity to make something that will make my heart tremble and transport me to places never imagined. I believe in the intuitions of an editor to make the cut at precisely the right moment that suspends the tension and has me gripping the seat. I believe in the bedroom teenagers recording their first demos on Garageband, or the gospel choir taking their congregations to heaven and back. Now, more than ever, I believe in these miracles.

But my belief is not anchored in any unique technical excellence, or some hubris about our exceptionalist mastery of craft. It is rooted in the profound humanity of it all, which radiates, however dimly, with the image of the divine. Writing poetry, humming a new melody, baking a cake or, even discovering a new mathematical conjecture can feel like “divine inspiration” as the leading mathematician, Thomas Fink, asserts. Or as the Romantic German theologian, Schleiermacher, so rhapsodically expressed, it can feel like the soul being “ignited from an ethereal fire, and the magic thunder of a charmed speech’" from above. This transcendent human experience is something that AI can’t usurp or supersede.

In a few decades, there may be nothing that humans can do better than AI, other than simply being human in the world. However, Once we are stripped of everything, we won’t find ourselves naked in the dark, or at least, we don’t have to. We can stand before the world and God with the works of our hands - finite, flawed, and dispossessed - and yet, inestimably valuable and worthwhile for the simple fact of our mere humanity.

*This article was something of a thought experiment. It’s far more natural to take a sandwich-board, bullhorn-wielding apocalyptic take on the rise of AI. The powers-to-be at Microsoft and OpenAI have their own ideological agendas, and it’s not unlikely that in this technological cycle, we’ll live through a profoundly destabilising labour market. We are right to fear the consolidation of wealth to supreme tech feudal lords with their companies of AI employees who cost a fraction of real humans. Civilisational collapse! What I wanted to suggest here is that there might be a unique spiritual and philosophical opportunity afforded to us as we continue to experience the break-neck development of AI and its encroachment into everything we once held as uniquely human skills.*