\n<\/p>\n
The verdant and blooming garden outside the family home in The Zone of Interest<\/span>, nominated for<\/a> 2024 Academy Awards including best picture and best director, could appear in some celebrity\u2019s home tour on YouTube. In the yard, the mother swoops her baby down close to sniff various flowers. \u201cThis one is phlox,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n But all is not lovely here. Audiences might have a hint from the two minutes of complete darkness that begin this razor-sharp film that something is wrong in this Eden. The family dog sprints anxiously through most of the immaculate shots, grabbing food off the sumptuously set tables and knocking things over. Just over the garden hedge, you can see the puffs of smoke from a train going by. At night, there is a strange red glow on the bedroom walls, and no one seems to be able to sleep.<\/p>\n This is 1944, and the H\u00f6ss family live in their beautiful home next to the gate of Auschwitz concentration camp, of which Rudolf H\u00f6ss is the commandant. This part of the story is historical fact: H\u00f6ss was the real commandant of Auschwitz, responsible for creating an efficient machine for destroying human lives. He later confessed he\u2019d overseen the killing of 3 million people<\/a>.<\/p>\n But The Zone of Interest<\/span>, an antiseptic term<\/a> Nazis used to describe the area around Auschwitz, doesn\u2019t include that kind of historical detail about World War II or the Holocaust. Director Jonathan Glazer, who spent ten years on this project and shot it on location at Auschwitz, knows audiences have seen many such movies<\/a> and may, by now, be numb to their presentation of those horrors. Instead, he drops the audience straight into the H\u00f6ss family life as they swim and eat birthday cake. Only slowly do we absorb the darkness behind the \u201clife we\u2019ve always dreamed of,\u201d as H\u00f6ss\u2019s wife, Hedwig, describes it.<\/p>\n This is a horror movie, not a historical epic. The film shows no violence, which makes it all the more disturbing and unforgettable. It\u2019s important to watch with a high-fidelity audio setup because the family\u2019s picnics and play are peppered with distant gunshots and screams. Like many films about the Holocaust, Zone<\/span> is an examination of evil and the corruption of human hearts\u2014but in an unusual way for our cultural moment.<\/p>\n The last few years have seen an explosion of stories exploring how<\/em> a villain became evil\u2014think Cruella<\/span>, Joker<\/span>, or the Star Wars prequels. The true crime genre, too, is often more fascinated with the backstory of serial killers than with the stories of their victims. We have become accustomed to watching evil deeds explained, contextualized, maybe even justified.<\/p>\n Zone <\/span>is radical in its total disinterest in H\u00f6ss\u2019s backstory. It doesn\u2019t explain his evil with a difficult childhood or a life-changing trauma. Evil deeds themselves seem to turn this family evil\u2014and it is the entire family that\u2019s corrupted, even the children. As Ecclesiastes 7:7 (ESV) notes, \u201cSurely oppression drives the wise into madness, and a bribe corrupts the heart.\u201d<\/p>\n As the story progresses, we start to see the many ways the family\u2019s wrongdoing has deranged them, down to the way the children play together. The murders in the camp are unseen but wreaking havoc everywhere. I was reminded of a passage from Frederick Douglass\u2019s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass<\/span>, in which the former slave, abolitionist icon, and preacher<\/a> was not preoccupied with the psychology or backstory of slaveholders. Instead, he examines how slavery not only brought evil into his life but corrupted the hearts of his masters too.<\/p>\n When Douglass is sold to a new mistress who had never owned a slave before, he recalls that when he met her, she was \u201ca woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings.\u201d \u201cBut alas!\u201d he continued<\/a>:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n This kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The inverse of this heavy tale is Terrence Malick\u2019s A Hidden Life<\/span>, <\/em>which tells the true story<\/a> of an Austrian farmer who refused to fight for Nazi Germany. A Hidden Life<\/span> also begins with a family in a kind of Eden. But where the family in Zone <\/span>gains the world and loses their souls, the family of A Hidden Life<\/span> sees their world fall apart, while their souls remain free. \u201cDarkness is not dark to you,\u201d the Christian farmer prays as he is beaten in a jail cell.<\/p>\n Zone<\/span>\u2019s darkness is very dark. It is an accurate depiction of its moment, when most Germans did not resist Adolf Hitler, but it also offers a glimpse of an alternative virtuous life via two night-vision sequences that are based on the true story<\/a> of a 12-year-old who was part of the Polish resistance. These portions of the horror film are fleeting and too short\u2014can\u2019t we see more of that<\/em>?<\/p>\n But that<\/em> is not what the characters themselves seek: \u201cThey have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt\u201d (Psalm 14:3, ESV). In The Zone of Interest<\/span>, virtue is as rare as those glimpses in the night.<\/p>\n Emily Belz is a staff writer at Christianity Today<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n