Last night, I watched the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, and I can still feel it in my gut. It taps into present concerns as I survey the political and social landscape of my country and the world at large. Theologically, the film reminds us of what many religions have long asserted—depravity lurks in the human heart. “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom 3:1-12; NIV; see also Isa 53). Human atrocity is not perpetrated by “monsters,” but by ordinary people.
A Holocaust movie unlike any other I’ve seen, The Zone of Interest, is a horror film without the typical gore. The terror is in watching ordinary people live next to and participate in great evil—literally right next door. The film portrays, with considerable accuracy, the life of the Höss family who lived at Auschwitz. The father, Rudolf, was a commandant at the concentration camp and the mastermind of mass murder. While he “goes to the office” every day, his wife Hedwig and their children enjoy a luxurious life with death trains, gunshots, and burning bodies just beyond their peaceful garden wall.
In the film, Holocaust victims are not visible. We don’t see starving bodies, the squalor of the camp, the piles of shoes whose owners have been brutally killed. But we hear terror. The film juxaposes the visual beauty of the landscape and the mundane serenity of the Höss home with the sounds of violence—the victims’ screams, the yelling of guards, the trains, and most disturbing of all the film’s overall soundtrack, created by sound designer Johnnie Burn, composer Mica Levi, and sound mixer Tarn Willers. We are accostumed to films using visual elements to shock our sensibilities, which can leave us desensitized to cinematically portrayed violence. Instead, The Zone of Interest uses sound to incredible effect. In this way, the victims’ reality remains very present throughout. In fact, the soundtrack was so effective, it was difficult to bear at times.
Over the years, I’ve often wrestled with how the Holocaust could happen. I look at old photos of SS employees hanging out, laughing, and playing instruments after work as if they had just clocked out of their job at a car factory. Similarly, I see old lynching photos of white American fathers and mothers and youth smiling before the camera in front of dangling, mutilated Black bodies, even taking body parts home as souvenirs. It boggles the mind.
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