GENOCIDE NEXT DOOR

• Published date: 10 February 2024
• Publication title: Mix, The

Jonathan Glazer grew up in Hadley Wood, close to Barnet on the northern outskirts of London, where his family were part of a thriving Jewish community

‘‘There were all these fantastic characters, who were in and out of my house when I was a little boy,’’ he says. ‘‘Many of them were East End Jews who had moved to the suburbs for a better quality of life, not super-intellectual people, but incredible entertainers — vaudeville musicians, writers and the like. As a child, I loved and absorbed the richness of that culture.’’

The Holocaust, he says, was never openly talked about in his home, but ‘‘it was always present’’.

When his late father found out years ago that he was making a film about Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, his reaction was anger mixed with dismay.

‘‘He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re doing this for’,’’ Glazer recalled.‘‘‘Why are you digging it up? Let it rot.’ Those were the three words he used. His feeling was very much that it was gone, that it was in the past. I remember saying to him: ‘I really wish I could let it rot, but, no, Dad, it’s not in the past’.’’

It took Glazer almost 10 years to make The Zone of Interest (the characteristically neutral term used by the Nazis to describe the immediate area around the concentration camp), which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes film festival. During that time, there must have been moments when his father’s words echoed in his head, when the subject seemed so daunting that giving up and letting it rot may have seemed like the best option.

‘‘I had a very strange relationship with the project right from the off,’’ he says, as we chat over coffee in a London hotel. ‘‘This was the road I was going down and I couldn’t stop myself going down it, but at the same time I was ready to pull back from it at any moment. I almost wanted to hit a brick wall so I could turn around and say: ‘You know what? I tried and I can’t do it.’ I was almost willing that to happen.’’

The end result is an audacious film, formally experimental and with an almost clinically detached point of view.

Mainly shot on hidden cameras, it concentrates on the domestic life of the Hoss family (Rudolf, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children), whose house stood just outside the perimeter of the concentration camp, the horror within suggested in glimpses of smoking chimneys but, more disturbingly, through an almost constant ambient soundscape of industrial noise and human shouts and cries.

It is an unsettling film: a study in extreme cognitive dissonance. It stayed with me for weeks after I watched it, so much so that I attended another screening to try to decipher its uneasy merging of almost clinical observation and moments of abrupt and jarring experimentalism — the screen turns blood red at one point. On both occasions, it fulfilled Glazer’s aim ‘‘to make it a narrative that you, the viewer, complete, that you are involved in and ask questions of’’.

It was shot on location at Auschwitz, where, having gained permission from the trustees of the site’s museum, Glazer’s team took over a vacant house just outside the perimeter of the camp and, using archive photographs and survivors’ testimonies, meticulously recreated the villa that the Hoss family lived in for almost four years.

Unlike other films about the Holocaust, it focuses on the perpetrators rather than the victims, the camera never straying beyond the wall that separates the commandant’s garden from the camp itself.

Instead, under Glazer’s dispassionate directorial gaze, we witness the myriad ways that the couple’s domestic life adhered to a kind of ordered normality in the literal shadow of Auschwitz’s smoking chimneys. While he oversees the clinical business of mass extermination, she entertains friends, tends to her garden and is waited on by local women who carry out domestic chores at her bidding. In the evenings, he reads bedtime stories to his children and, before he retires to bed...