Colin Sheridan: Sounds that almost suffocate your senses

Based loosely on a Martin Amis novel of the same name, 'The Zone of Interest ' is both audacious and disturbing, placing you — the viewer — in the uncomfortable role of a detached, but complicit observe.

There is something eerily disconcerting about a stranger intruding on your personal space. Especially in a cinema. Especially during the deathly calm of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a movie so sinister in its silence it packs ten times the punch of exploding buildings and Tom Cruise driving a motorbike off a cliff and on to a helicopter.

The personal space violation was as unwelcome as it was justified. I was, unbeknownst to myself, bouncing my knee incessantly. 

Such was the collective stress the audience (of which I was an active member) was under, my nearest neighbour, an elderly woman, who I’m sure did not take her decision lightly, saw fit to place her hand on my runaway knee in a desperate attempt to get me to stop. It’s one thing bouncing your knee at Bullet Train, it’s quite another at a movie as delicately destructive as The Zone of Interest, which is one of the most haunting ruminations on the banality of evil you’re ever likely to see on a cinema screen.

The privilege that we can choose, pay even, to go to the movies in order to test our threshold of morality is one that has never been more pronounced. Hourly dispatches filmed on mobile phones of mangled children, of orphaned babies, of decimated neighbourhoods, they flood our screens and affect our moods. 

We can turn the notifications off. We can delete the app. We can ignore the newspapers and we can switch over from the news. Doing one or all of these things will likely improve your mood, if, like me and many others, you feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer horror of what is happening in Gaza for the last four months (or, if you’re really paying attention, Sudan and Darfur), you may find a break from all the insidious noise restorative and refreshing.

You could switch them all off, and you could go to the cinema to escape. If you do, and you happen to find yourself at The Zone of Interest, your mood won’t thank you, but your conscience might. 

Based loosely on a Martin Amis novel of the same name, the movie is both audacious and disturbing, placing you — the viewer — in the uncomfortable role of a detached, but complicit observer. Predominantly shot on hidden cameras, it captures the domestic life of the Höss family (Rudolf, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children), whose blissful existence unfolds unperturbed in what is known as the zone of interest, the characteristically neutral term used by the Nazis to describe the immediate area around the concentration camp. 

The camp in this instance is Auschwitz, and Rudolf Höss is its commandant.

I’ll let you in on the movie’s secret. You see no death. Your eyes are not burdened by images of the emaciated torsos of little Jewish kids inside the camp’s wire. 

Sandra Hüller in a scene from 'The Zone of Interest'. Predominantly shot on hidden cameras, it captures the domestic life of the Höss family. Picture: A24/AP

Instead, all you see is the white picket fences of the Hoss’s garden, the perfectly manicured lawns, the prettily tailored dresses. The happy children splashing in a paddling pool. The budding azaleas. You’ll watch Rudolf Höss read bedtime stories to his kids, before carefully switching off all the lights and locking the front door. Sound familiar?

That’s what you’ll see when you watch his film, but what you’ll hear is something else entirely. What you’ll hear will wake you up at night and return to you weeks after watching.

What you’ll hear comes from just over the white picket fence. Beyond the pool and the azaleas. What you’ll hear is the almost constant drone of furnaces burning, of distant screams, of dogs aggressively barking, of trains arriving and departing.

It is these sounds that almost suffocate your senses as you watch scenes of a handsome couple aspiring for a life of bourgeois bliss with their dinner parties and summer plans.

It’s a jarring experience, watching this movie. One that will have your knee bouncing without you realising. One that will have your neighbour’s hand reach out to stop it, lest the atmosphere in the theatre become any more unpalatable. Amis published the novel ten years ago. It took all of that time for its director Jonathon Glazer to get it made.

How terrifyingly apt that the movie — which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival to universal acclaim — is so prescient in its embodiment of the banality of evil in the face of the relentless atrocities in Gaza, horrors we choose to either watch in 20-second clips before tossing our phones or ignore completely.

It could never have been Glazer’s intention to land this movie on our laps at a time when the very fabric of our collective humanity is being so flagrantly tested, but the parallels are too strikingly obvious to disregard. Gaza, the Sudan and Darfur — they are atrocities hidden just over the wall from us for decades. Some choose to be more oblivious than others, worried only about the pruning of prized rosebushes.

Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Holocaust survivor wrote: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Life is hard. Bills must be paid. Papers are due. Our hearts get broken. But, for those of us with the privilege of eyes and ears and a fridge full of food, this movie reminds us all that we can never look away. So don’t look away.