Zone of Interest is one of the best cinematic attempts there is to make tangible Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil. For Arendt, the evil of the Holocaust was not in the first instance its unique sadism, but its uniquely depraved moral universe – the instrumentalization of human beings which allowed them to be treated as problems to be solved with bureaucratic indifference. 

The whole production of the film – its narrative, aesthetic, and essence, from the set design to faux-artless cinematography, to its performances – is geared to evoking dispassionate observation, as if capturing and showing this banality. The evil happens off-screen. We are left to experience and inhabit the banality.  

The film succeeds as a reminder of one particular and grotesque aspect of the uniqueness of the Holocaust: the bureaucratic methodology of the decision-making that went into the industrial extermination of the Jews, simply because they were Jews. Director Jonathan Glazer goes to great pains to confront the horror that the extermination was carried out not by crazed sadists, but by ordinary family men. Arendt’s description of Eichmann, one of the designers of the Final Solution, was that he was “terrifyingly normal”. While Eichmann’s own character may in fact remain an object of theoretical or psychoanalytical speculation, Zone of Interest makes us directly witness, by means of art, the horror of this terrifying normal.

The film takes inspiration from Martin Amis’s book of the same name. However where Amis invents fictional storylines and characters, for Glazer the historical truth of a family living happily next door to Auschwitz is enough for an intriguing subject. Simply illustrating this one obscene historical detail – domesticity cheek by jowl with barbarism – serves as the best metaphor for the banality of evil. That the obscenity endures to the present day is brought home toward the end of the film when, after the feature-long examination of Auschwitz commander-in-chief Rudolf Höss and his family, Glazer presents a forceful sequence of images.

The film transitions to the present-day Auschwitz Holocaust museum and shows footage of the museum’s real cleaners preparing the site for visitors. The detached depiction of these individuals carrying out their duties within the gas chambers and ovens is disquieting: how can these tasks be carried out with such indifference, in this location, that bore witness to some of the most atrocious acts in human history? Can these atrocities be sufficiently comprehended by preserving these relics in stasis? Again, as witnesses with no recourse to action, we are made to feel complicit in the enduring horror. 

Zone of Interest lives in this gap between the past and the present. Our inability to fully comprehend the past necessitates its interpretation, a task fraught with difficulty when approached with the purpose of being historically accurate. This difficulty is equally true for an artistic purpose. How can a film employing traditional, classical Hollywood storytelling methods (centered on heroes and villains) adequately convey the banality of evil? It cannot. Glazer’s answer to this artistic conundrum, the conjuring of the horror by recreating the banality, is the masterstroke of the film. By relying on our prior knowledge of the atrocities, he makes us complicit in their wilful ignorance by forcing us to inhabit their evasion. 

Glazer achieves this through very deliberate and, by Hollywood standards, unusual artistic choices. He opted to film on location, in a re-designed, abandoned home situated outside the actual camp walls, near the original Höss family residence. He used a setup of ten hidden cameras placed strategically around the house, allowing the actors to improvise freely – a technique he likened to “Big Brother in the Nazi house”. Glazer avoids any obvious cinematic language, such as close-ups, that could foster identification with the characters, leaving us instead to witness and endure, like the cleaners at the Auschwitz museum, the banality of mass murder.

Glazer made Zone of Interest because the teaching of the Holocaust – that the simple carrying out of orders regardless of their content, a moral and intellectual deformation voluntarily endured through pure obedience, can lead to the mass-eradication of human beings – stands as a human truth. However, between the making of the film and its release, 7 October 2023 happened. It was the most fatal antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. A film focusing on antisemitism that does not, due to circumstances, reckon with this pogrom feels out of time. This lack makes the film necessary, but also strangely mute. It is a contemporary film that is already an anachronism. Talking about the banality of evil now feels like an evasion of a present evil that is anything but banal or “terrifyingly normal”.

Zone of Interest won best International Film at this year’s Academy Awards. When picking up the Oscar, Glazer felt compelled to distance himself from Israel’s ongoing military actions. He and his producer insisted that the film was not about antisemitism but “dehumanization” more generally, and that this is continued in today’s conflict in Gaza. In doing so, he deemphasized that it was antisemitism, and antisemitism alone, that was the motivation for the Final Solution, as well as the Hamas attacks. The director and producer “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people”. By unlinking the Holocaust and the unique banality of the evil of its perpetrators from their antisemitic ideology, the film makers may have compromised the message of their own film. 

The sadism and glee with which Hamas terrorists killed, raped, tortured, and mutilated their Jewish victims, the pride with which they documented and broadcast their actions, has given antisemitism a new, obscene form. “Terrifyingly normal” is no longer adequate to describe it. These are not the bureaucrats of old, but the barbarians of today. Whereas the banality of evil gave a name to the easy complicity with, and wilful denial of, evil by its handmaidens, no such handmaidens exist today in the same way, and no such wilful denial. Rather, the perpetrators of evil delight and revel in the performance of their inhuman tasks, while their apologists march openly through cities.    

It took 80 years to make a truly adequate film about the banality of evil, as described by Arendt. But within that time, evil itself has moved on. 

Maren Thom

This article was first published on Cafe Americain