If you've already seen "The Zone of Interest," which won Oscars last night for best international feature film and best sound, you undoubtedly have feelings about it. If you haven't, I urge you to watch it as soon as you can. (In a theater, if possible.) As a film about the Holocaust, it's not an easy watch — in fact, I found it devastating — but it also feels essential, in the way that the most important films do.
Not everyone is on record as admiring the film. But for many viewers, it has an unshakable power that has a lot to do with an unnerving relevance to the world today. The director, Jonathan Glazer, has said, "For me, this is not a film about the past." By focusing almost entirely on the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family — and only occasionally, but artfully, allowing the unimaginable reality of the death camp Höss managed to intrude on the action — Glazer compels us, as he's said, to examine "our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims."
It's a powerful idea. There have been many films about historical atrocities — even very affecting ones — but few films ask us so provocatively to consider how we might coexist contemporaneously with the knowledge of horror, as the characters in "Zone of Interest" blithely learn to do. In a guest essay published on Friday, the journalist David Klion grapples with that idea, and examines how "Zone" demands that we reflect "on our own degrees of complicity in the horrors that we know are being carried out on the other sides of figurative and literal walls today."
The film resonates, and unsettles, long after it's over. How can it not? The world that it's asking us to reconsider, as well as our role in it, persists, awaiting us as we exit the theater.
Read the guest essay:
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