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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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

Creed

Easter

Resurrection

18 April 2025

4 min read

Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with

How can we 'go figure' the seemingly incomprehensible?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Adrian Mag on Unsplash.

Forgive me for getting a bit ahead of myself, but I’d like to say something of the Resurrection. We’ve barely even started the Triduum and the Jesuit saying rings in my ears: “If we don’t die with him on Good Friday, we can’t rise with him on Easter morning.”

But part of the problem this epigram presents is that it’s not so much Good Friday that we skip over, but Easter morning. In our determination to focus on the Passion of the Christ, Easter can perhaps be a joyful sermon, a jolly good lunch, an exclamation that “He is risen!” and we move on.

So when it comes to miracles, too often it’s the Big One from which we avert our attention. And we can even skip the entire thing. I encountered two of my erstwhile Church primary-school children on a Holy Week dog walk. “Father George!” they cried. I’m afraid I spoke to them and their parents about clues for an Easter-egg hunt.

Like the size of the universe, Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with. So we confine ourselves to reciting facts and beliefs. Our universe is 13 billion light years wide and came from literally nothing. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples.

There is a real fear of the Resurrection among the faithful. Not in the way that scripture speaks of the fear of God, but a much more basic fear of the schoolchild that we’re not getting it right. It’s as if we’re meant to believe but can’t, with a dash of the awful dread that those who say that - rather like Donald Trump - it’s not to be taken literally but seriously might just be right.

It’s the fear of the yawning abyss between literal truth (in Greek, logos) and metaphorical or allegorical truth (mythos). And it’s as if we’re being forced to make a choice that, in conscience, we can’t. As such, it becomes what St Paul might call a stumbling block, something that gets in the way rather than illuminates. And it’s one we quietly ignore.

I think I want to say that we need to be liberated from the worry that there’s a right way to interpret it, or that there’s a binary choice to be made between literal and metaphorical truth. In the events of Easter morning, we’re being offered a both/and response rather than an either/or choice.

In this model, historicity is useful but insufficient. We know as a historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman authorities and we can very reasonably assume, in historical terms, that one of his disciples, a woman from Magdala called Mary, went to his tomb after the Jewish sabbath and found it empty.

Thereafter the experience of the Resurrection becomes harder, if not impossible, to describe. Not just for us, but especially for the first witnesses to it. That’s partly why this gospel scripture is written in a way that is unlike any other, more breathless, more personal, more anecdotal and more experiential. It’s as if the insurgent Jesus movement is seeing in colour for the first time.

If we’re looking for a miracle, incidentally, here it is. Whatever has happened, the utter defeat and dispersal of this small, provincial band of rebels in death and despair has been irreversibly transformed within three days. The two-word modern term for this phenomenon might be: Go figure.

But we should not avert our eyes from less convenient phenomena, evidence that is not just metaphorical or allegorical but which may be downright worldly and motivated by expedience. It isn’t controversial to observe that there is a difference between the empty-tomb narratives and the apparitions (as the Roman Catholic catechism calls them) of the risen Christ, the latter in part arising from competing factions for patriarchal authority the earliest formation of Church.

The empty tomb isn’t just evidence of the risen Christ. It’s there to show us symbolically where God is not. In John’s gospel, Mary sees cherubim sitting at the head and foot of the slab on which the body lay, echoing the mercy-seat of the ancient ark of the covenant, the empty throne of the invisible Jewish God, Yahweh. The Christ has “gone ahead” to continue the living work of God in his nascent Church of the new covenant.

Above all (and those two words can be read literally), this dualistic approach to the Resurrection calls its observers to relax about it, to let go of our understanding of it. The words and actions of the risen Christ often seem to confirm as much: "Don't hang on to me", "Shalom" (Peace be with you), "Come and eat", "Feed my lambs".

So, struggling to comprehend the Resurrection isn’t a deal-breaker. In a way, the divine message is that the biggest miracle of all is no big deal. Life really does go on.

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