Terry Hunter reviews THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Updated: Feb. 5, 2024 at 6:41 PM HST
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THE ZONE OF INTEREST, a movie from the United Kingdom, is one of the five Oscar nominees for Best international Film. But this film wasn’t made to entertain you. It’s based on the real lives of the upper middle class family that lived literally right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The family’s ordinary lives go on as if horrific mass murders weren’t happening on the other side of a high wall. We hear screams, shouts, gunfire, and the roar of the crematoriums. But we are never shown anything that takes place inside the camp. To say that THE ZONE OF INTEREST is disturbing to watch is an understatement. The family consists of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoss, his wife Hedwig, their 5 children and several servants. It seems the director’s purpose is to show that evil doers of the worst kind look like ordinary people. (The banality of evil is what historians call this.) Critics have praised this film for its creativity. But for me THE ZONE OF INTEREST was like a piece of conceptual art that should not have been turned into a full length feature film. We feel the horror of the atrocities this family ignores in the first ten minutes. The rest of the movie feels like piling on. (KAHALA MALL)