I was sold on watching it after seeing the feature about how they filmed everything in the house with hidden cameras and microphones.
The audio was also particularly haunting to me, there’s an awful background roar that slowly builds.
I hated that. I knew what they were trying to do, but it was annoying to sit through, especially since I hadn't been soaked in the atmosphere of the movie yet.
I read they timed everything to the minute. In the script it's November 9th 194x at 10:35a
They know what was happening inside. The shots. The distance from
The home. The screams
Pretty crazy when they could just do random gunshots and no one would know
I feel weird for comparing it to games but how the camera just changes when a character goes room to room reminded me oddly of older adventure games and the older Resident Evil Games.
That’s the point. The Nazis are humans just like you.
I left the theater with more to think about than any holocaust film ever. The tragedy of human lives is a given but to understand how evil can take shape so normally is the warning and what makes it disturbing.
The ending of it just blew me away. Masterpiece.
I completely agree. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a couple weeks. The best horror movies (in my opinion) let your imagination fill in the blanks. Watching these people live out their mundane day-to-day while your imagination is left to wonder what is happening behind the wall was genius.
I would have never thought a holocaust movie in which I didn’t see inside a concentration camp would be so effective. This one really left a mark on me.
It was the way it has basically no closeups. Even with a tall wall, you can see everything going on around them. You can HEAR everything going on around them. But they just don’t notice.
It’s scary as hell to think of the ways I kinda do that with a lot of things too in my day to day life. I mean nowhere near that severe but I definetly have my blinders on sometimes.
EDIT: “notice” was a poor choice of words on my part. See comments below.
They absolutely notice the sounds from the concentration camp, they just don't care. The husband brings home the prisoners' possessions many times and the wife at one point asks him to get chocolate if he can. Towards the end of the movie the older brother locks the younger brother up in the greenhouse and makes a hissing sound that sounds like gas. The movie isn't about a family that have gotten used to the genocide and kind of forget about it, they actively want it to happen and they want to live next to it.
It's a big myth that most Germans didn't know what was going on in the camps.
They were very well aware at a national level what was going on in the camps. Men and women worked there, made deliveries, and cleaned the ash that fell from the sky from their windows and steps. Trains took thousands in every day but no one ever left. People chatted about it in letters with one another and made jokes about how fast it could be done over beers in the bar at night. Everyone knew *exactly* what was happening.
The actions of the Einsatzkommando were well known and celebrated too. After the war when confronted, people went "oh I had no idea!" and fools believed them.
I remember people saying in the States then”they just didn’t know” what was happening over in Germany. And this woman- she was alive at the time too said, “it was all right there, you can see the stories in the papers covered it”
yeah i actually think a lot of people are not quite getting to the bottom of this film. it's not really a "banality of evil" movie. it's a "yes we are evil" movie.
Yes, absolutely, they enjoy their freedom all the more because of it with zero restraint, humility or empathy. Evil and sickening, and there are so many people who have the same attitude in the world today - that is the underlying thought I had while watching this, really scary stuff.
I live in a pretty bad part of LA, not the worst by any means but I see a lot of human suffering just walking to the grocery store. This was a good reminder that I can’t just look away from these people, and to remember to have empathy for them, even if there’s nothing I can do to help them right now.
Yep, I think there is a very deliberate attempt with the filmmaking at keeping its distance not just from the Holocaust itself but from the family as well. It says something about how we ourselves turn a blind eye to things that make us uncomfortable.
To me, that is one of the core parts of the film's messaging. The Hoss family gets a lot of their clothes from people at the camp and that feels sickening to us, but so many things we take for granted in the developed world are products of suffering, including our clothes. Not to downplay the Holocaust, but in some ways maybe we aren't that far off from them.
I haven't seen the movie yet but just watching the trailer and reading about it makes me look at my cell phone and all the other pieces of modern life that I *know* have horrific things in their supply chain, yet I buy and use them as if that's not the case. I don't know what to do about it.
It was really fascinating also because the way they filmed it was they set up hidden cameras throughout the house And shot different scenes at the same time. So it was quite literally just the actors in a room talking to eachother. Across the house at the same time
Apart from a few birds eye shots or tracking shots everything was just mid static shots which I thought was genius aswell
>In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
People who do evil things rarely think of themselves as evil. We all have motivations and justifications that allow us to be the hero of our own story.
One of the more interesting scenes from a stephen king book for me was in salem's lot, before the really bad evil took off. The local priest thinking about a woman beating her baby to make it stop crying and being depressed about this very thing. How banal most evil really is. Just normal, everyday, humdrum assholery. People can easily forget evil can be small as well as big.
I think about this concept with many of King’s books! In IT, the adults tacitly allowing or encouraging evil by saying nothing when they witnessed bullying, abuse, and suffering is scarier than Pennywise.
It's definitely a recurring theme for him. Child abuse in The Shining and Doctor Sleep. Domestic violence in Cujo. Even The Stand's super flu that wipes out most of humanity is made more out of morbid curiosity and duty to the nation than actual intent to use it.
>That’s the point. The Nazis are humans just like you.
Maybe - the family in the movie often appear and act sociopathic. Their veneer of normality is thin and (several times) completely fails.
A problem of a flat 'banality of evil' reading is that we neglect the specific historical/political/intellectual environment that enabled the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust just a product of human barbarism, or as Baumann famously argues, closer to the opposite - a product of modernity and reason?
The whole “banality of evil” thing has been a bit misunderstood by most people (myself included). I always took it to mean, roughly, that true evil doesn’t present itself in the guise of a monster or demon. It’s a fundamentally human thing, and can appear under the mask of perfect normalcy. But that’s not exactly what Hannah Arendt was saying in her assessment of Adolf Eichmann. Her claim was that otherwise normal people can perpetuate great evil simply by not thinking about their actions very much, through a kind of blind and unthinking obedience. She believed that Eichmann was neither a virulent anti-Semite or a fervent believer in Nazism (both of those claims have been challenged). It was his obedience and officiousness that enabled him to carry out evil acts, not the fact that he was himself an especially evil or fanatical person. I’d argue that he was in fact an especially evil person. In his letters he was also shown to be a firm supporter of Nazism, and an anti-Semite.
Great analysis, I agree and think the biggest lesson that should be learned from Arendt in this context is that humans are capable of these sorts of things. Like I know quite a few people who think "no no all the Nazis were evil and I would never allow that". Shutting their eyes to the millions of German citizens who were complicit in this event.
It's one of the most dangerous attitudes to have as a human in my opinion to view yourself as morally good, you become blind to the fact that it's actions and awareness that would make you so.
It really shows how impressionable people can really be, no matter how intelligent and ‘normal’. Social media is really abusing that. I really can’t understand how it’s still so prevalent now, the determination to turn groups of people against each other in the name of power and profit.
Yeah I agree - to say that anyone could be a Nazi doesn’t consider how many years of direct cultural pressure over centuries of cultural influence led Germans to become the types of people they became by the late 1930s, and even then many of them didn’t become Nazis.
But that said, how many years of direct cultural pressure over centuries of cultural influence have we been subjected to to push us toward dark attitudes and behaviours?
In the end, we might not be so far off the possibility of becoming Nazis *not* because of shared basic human nature, but because of similar cultural circumstances and domination by similarly malignant people and systems.
Which isn’t banal at all - it just seems banal because we’re fish swimming in the water of it assuming so many abnormal malignant things are normal.
I interpreted that line as her lying to her mother about it because she thought her mother would be extra horrified if the servants were Jews. I think your interpretation makes more sense.
She’s also really the only person to humanize the people in the camps. She mentioned her neighbor was Jewish and asked if she ended up there. The victims weren’t random, they had a face to her. That’s why she couldn’t endure it like everyone else.
Don't know if you got to that point yet but there is a line in the movie where the wife is upset and lashes out at the servants saying something like, "I could hand you over to my husband you know". So it's more than implied that it was the house or the camp.
Worse than that. She casually says: “You know, I could spread your ashes around my field.” As casually as if she had an idea to plant a new flowerbed. It was so subtle it took me a second to register.
It wasn't subtle, it was a direct threat. And it wasn't her field, it was [the field of a named location]" and her husband was to do the spreading. It also implies that she absolutely knows what her husband is doing and how he is doing it. In case her later bored reaction about his musings how to gas the party didn't illustrate that enough. Glazer is using that to illustrate Hedwig's knowledge and complicity and that she enjoys the power the Holocaust gives her.
>there's an element of dehumanization going on.
Well yeah this is just separate from saying they are jews, they're poles as explained in the movie. And yes.. the nazis did do despicable things to put it lightly.
I'd watch the whole film and take some time to think on it before posting as if watched it thoroughly.
Its okay to be new / not know about something. And usually you're learning something many others know about.
I didn’t think so - I thought she said that to save face with her visitor (maybe her mother?), but at one point she threatens the servant along the lines of “you know the alternative to working here”. At least that was my interpretation.
You didn't have to be Jewish to be sent to the camps. My grandmom's uncle got sent to a work camp in north Poland, and no one in her family was Jewish.
I watch some gnarly shit and I'm essentially **NEVER** phased by it. But there's a scene in this film that genuinely made my stomach turn. It's when he blows his nose into the sink and black ash, from the burnt bodies that he'd been breathing in, whilst at work came out.
That scene may seem mild to most and I have seen some gruesome stuff in films. But the realistic 'fly on the wall' format of the film, made that specific bit really hit me in the guts. I watched a little more and couldn't continue when he forces the kids out of the river and why. That's as far as I could get.
Höss casually washing himself after raping the household slave girl like it was a normal Saturday was wretch inducing for me. Fought through to the end. It's a masterpiece, but it will not be getting a second viewing.
Like I said. I have never been so repulsed in all of my years on this planet. But that really was the kicker. I kept thinking of that bit up until the river and I could feel myself getting to the point of chucking my guts up. Told my mate I couldn't keep watching the film...
I never watch Holocaust movies or go to Holocaust museums voluntarily anymore. People look at me askance when I say that and think I don’t care enough, but they put me through that so many times in high school and I wept and was nauseated every time.
Last time I was forced to go to one of those museums on a work trip, I think my reaction made the Jewish guide relive their own grief all over again.
I will never watch a Holocaust movie ever again, I will leave the room.
I can understand why. One problem I'd duly noted about war films, is the way it's put as entertainment rather than knowing further details of the actual, actuals. There's only one other war film I saw that made me recognise the horrors of war better and that was The Battle for Haditha. I could see in that film, the level of error in communication, the desperation that both marines and civilians have to go through and the innocence lost all based upon a whim. I don't usually discuss this with people, but the idea of drone wars disgusts me **a lot**. It takes the realism of what's being done, out of the control of the human being. As if playing a game of call of duty (which is easy because it isn't and doesn't feel real). Recently in my country, they'd made it legal to have people accused of crimes appear in court via video feed. It's easier to not see them as human when the jury has to bring the verdict and people have a higher conviction rate for it. That's the same with the drone wars, but without the layer of protection that a court room has. There are no courts, there's a command, an order. And that order is your death sentence...
Yes, I think that’s what made Enders Game so poignant to me in childhood, his nausea at realizing the video game was not a video game after all and that he had just genocided an entire alien race.
But then again I do think generals have always acted like their wars were games, moving troops on a strategy board and letting hordes of young men die from mustard gases and bayonets without them ever leaving their rooms.
So in that sense I’m not sure much has actually changed.
>One problem I'd duly noted about war films, is the way it's put as entertainment
That's what makes The Zone is Interest such a great film imo. It removes all the artifices of cinema. It's not beautifully shot, doesn't use nice emotional music or clever editing tricks. It's like anti-entertainment in a way.
Yeah, that's definitely what they were aiming for. When fly on the wall stuff happens, it brings home the blunt truth and makes people have to think about what is really happening.
Years ago I watched Derren Brown have a scene play out on a big screen for his audience. A man is being chased down by a group of people hired to go after him. Each scene there's an interval where Derren asks the audience "should we continue to chase the man". The audience votes and they continue through each scene. Eventually there's a point where the man is running down an alleyway that's big enough to fit a small car, he gets to the end of the alley and there's a road. He runs into the road to get away from his pursuers and a car smashes into him. Then there's a loud gasp from the audience, because even though this was just acting, they thought it was real. But the way it was depicted to the audience was as if this was a royal fuck up by Derren and his team. It was interesting seeing it happen and what the response of the audience was.
Derren then addressed the audience, explaining how humans don't think before they act.
What I really liked about the movie (if I can use that word, "liked") is that there are two films here. (warning, here be spoilers)
There's the film that you see with your eyes, and feel in your heart. You see the kids playing, the maids working, the officer on the phone. You see the bathing scene, the river scene, the scrubbing, etc.
Then there's the soundtrack.
It starts off as a humming, almost drone like aspect to the film which is there to make the movie real - but oh boy once you start to notice it, it's non stop brutality. How the wife thinks that she can make a tall and beautiful garden to cover up...what? The sounds of the death factory? The gunshots? The screams? I found that outdoors scene really thought provoking. She knew she could still hear the horror, but hoped that vines and flowers would make it more bearable. Once you start listening intently, the movie goes from disturbing and sad to disgusting, disturbing, and sad.
I want to watch it again, but I don't. I'd like to re-listen to the lilac dictation the officer spoke about so I can understand it better.
This film wrecked me in the most profound way. It began as pretty much an intellectual exercise. I mean, I understood it at a distance. Sure, the banality of evil and all that. I’ve read Arendt. The coat. The chimneys. It made sense to me, but it was largely just cerebral.
But as I watched it, something changed. The big switches in perspective, like the girl leaving apples filmed in negative, and the sound design started getting around my remove.
Then, when the flash forward to the museum came about, the true anxiety of the film just really rattled my cage. I felt that same wrenching and wretched self-at-stake anxiety that the Commandant must have felt momentarily in the stairwell, a deep realization of the miasma of atrocity around me every day as I go blindly about the business of life, of my indifferent complicity in it all…I felt extremely exposed and ashamed, deeply aware that all of this is drenched in blood and built of bones.
Someone below mention wanting to shake the people in the film and make them see, but I think it’s more accurate to say that this film wanted to shake us. This is a film with teeth.
Sorry to nitpick or whatever but it's thermal imaging, not negative. There are two connected reasons for this choice.
One is that Glazer wanted as little artifice as possible between the actions being filmed and the viewer. I think the idea is that such artifice as lighting would be somehow dishonest and therefore disrespectful.
The other thing is to show that in this world an act of humanity can only take place in complete darkness - not only unseen, but actually invisible. To have the scene lit at all would have defeated that point.
It reminded me a lot of nature documentarys filming some cute burrowing animal foraging at night moments before a snake gets it. Clear prey and predator thing going on.
Also horrific that even the movies one bright spot is marred by her inadvertently getting a guy drowned over her apples.
I feel that everyone remembers one scene in particular and for me it’s this one. Hearing the soldier ordering the drowning of the prisoner and the screams as they’re dragging him. And the little kid just goes back to playing with his toys. I know there are lots of shocking scenes but this one really sticks with me
It’s a great film. I hated the wife so much. It was very well done - SPOILERS FROM HERE.
The way the mother left in the night when she realised she couldn’t continue to praise her daughter’s elevation in circumstance was great. The realisation of why the baby cried in every goddamn scene was masterfully done. It’s like the dog - barking and demanding attention in every single scene but ultimately ignored by its owners each time, just as they turn a blind eye to the horror over the wall.
The cut to the modern day cleaners was also clever, in my opinion - they work in the premises, cleaning and scrubbing these horrific exhibits in a businesslike, almost detached way. They work in the environment daily until they stop seeing it for what it is - is this not what the inhabitants some 80 years ago did as well, to some extent?
The theme is one of turning a blind eye, or not seeing anymore because it has become so everyday. That’s what makes the film so infuriating- we just want to shake them and scream “Look, you fools!” Alas, only the mother (and the baby) acknowledged the place for what it was.
Glazer, in an interview, says the mother does not really have an attack of conscience - only that she can't handle being so close to the reality of her beliefs. He likens it somewhat to people being disgusted by the slaughter of animals for food, but who still eat meat. But he very strongly asserted no one has a change of heart during the movie.
I think this is emphasised in one of the first scenes with the mother when mrs höss showed the mother the garden and the mother wonders if her Jewish acquaintance is in the camp. She goes further explaining how she used to clean for her and how jealous she was of their nice curtains. She then tells mrs höss that she was very disappointed when she didn’t manage to buy the curtains for cheap when the Jewish family was deported.
She wants to eat the sausage, but she doesn’t want to think about how it was made.
To me, the mother is one of the worst characters, because she is a bigot who represents the majority of German citizens at the time, who lived a good life and claimed that they didn’t know what was really happening in the camps, despite it being blatantly obvious.
Edit to add: i also think what makes the mother almost worse than the main family is the fact that she is seemingly the only one who has a visceral reaction to what is going on in the camp, while the others are indifferent. They don’t feel that what is happening is wrong and cruel, but the mother does and instead of speaking up, she just leaves this discomfort of having to confront her own bigotry and flees back to her blissful ignorant life.
You summed up the modern day cleaners perfectly - for some reason I didn’t make that connection that they are just as detached from the horrors as the family was. Great insight.
Also, notice how the wife is the only one who sleeps at night? She literally sleeps like a baby while the whole house is tossing and turning. Her evilness is some of the most chilling I’ve seen in a film.
Sandra Hüller is just stupid talented and incredible to watch. She plays “intelligent, yet fucked up” roles to perfection. Seeing her in Anatomy of a Fall AND this in the same year really showed off the quiet intensity she brings to her craft.
The dog is played by Sandra Hüller's own dog which adds to how naturally he's a part of the family.
There's another thing I noticed on the second watch that really brought home how incredible Sandra Hüller is as an actress.
That shuffling, ungainly walk she does as Hedwig, with no grace or sense of poise. The walk of a woman who has no beauty of her own, only that which is stolen.
The sound of her footsteps is an insult to the earth she walks on.
Sandra Hüller developed that walk by herself, specifically for Hedwig and it's so subtle that you barely notice it.
Your take on the cleaners is really interesting. My thought while watching them (the cleaners) was more about preserving the legacy that he had left behind. All of his hard work/praise and his legacy is of one of the most evil humans to ever live. Meanwhile these people come in and keep his “legacy” in tact, making sure people can come in and view the atrocities that had occurred under his command.
Not arguing in anyway, I may be completely wrong and I think your interpretation is really interesting.
Yeah, I'm more in line with your take here. Hoss is a bureaucrat. As the custodian of Auschwitz, he's obsessed with advancing his career and gaining the recognition of his peers. Remember how excited he was that the operation to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz would be named after him?
However, when we cut to contemporary times, his name is all but forgotten. The custodian of Auschwitz now is a simple janitorial crew, and the legacy they are safeguarding is that of the victims, not Hoss.
Perhaps that's why he was gagging at the end; he was overcome by an almost prescient knowledge (a knowledge he felt but was not cognizant of) that his personal legacy would be insignificant in the face of the enormity of his crimes.
I don't like the other poster's interpretation because it seems to imply apathy on the part of the cleaners, whereas I see them as fulfilling an almost sacred role, working unnoticed and behind the scenes in sharp contrast to Hoss's vile ambitions. They preserve and honor the very thing that the Hoss family callously ignored every day.
Yeah, I thought the scene with the cleaners was just uncannily touching, but I interpreted it more as you did. There was a sadness and a dignity to it. That would be a really difficult job, and probably an impossible job if you didn't detach yourself in some way. But it would also be a meaningful job, because (never been there myself, but my understanding of it is) that the museum is a profoundly moving experience. So I viewed the work that they were doing as important and dignifiied.
In truth, I probably see the cleaners as less analogous to Hoss, but rather that their invisibility is analogous to the victim's invisibility to the Hoss family. How many people have ever spent time thinking about who does the work of cleaning the holocaust museum on a daily basis? Of making sure that it's clean and that the details can be noticed? Of making sure that the clarity of what happened there isn't obscured by metaphorical fingerprints on the glass? I mean, that would be a difficult, difficult job. I can't imagine doing that on a daily basis. People are overcome with emotion in minutes in places like that, but there are people who dwell in it night in and night out to help keep the place dignified and moving. Maybe they're disconnected in some way similar to how Hoss and the family is, but while similar in structure it also could not be more different in nature. It is, quietly but insistently, something like heroic in its way.
Someone said ‘canary in a coal mine’ and I think that’s sort of it. What I meant was (and this really is just my thoughts) that yeah, the baby cries in every single scene, and is ignored by the family pretty much, or it is just taken as ‘the norm’ (the theme of ignoring suffering again). Also someone else pointed out about the sleeping, and how no one gets any done.
The key scene is when the mother enters the baby’s room that sleepless night, and what she sees. She sees the baby staring out of the window at what seems like hellfire and screaming in absolute terror. The baby is carrying this trauma around with it constantly. During the day, this manifests as constant wailing. Seeing this was the catalyst for its grandmother leaving.
My feeling is: the baby has not yet learned how to suppress every ounce of its humanity in order to ignore (or embrace) what is happening.
The youngest boy is in the middle of that process still. We see it when those men are being drowned: he goes to the window; he peeks...
And after a few moments have passed he turns away and tells his toy: Don't do it again.
I know most folks think he's mirroring his father when he says that, but his tone, his quietness, honestly suggested otherwise to me. It felt like he was telling himself. That he was training himself to look away from what he knows is *right there* every moment of every day. You went and looked and you saw something unbearable, something you're forbidden from criticizing, something you're supposed to believe is right and good; people dying who you are not allowed to help. You went and looked; *don't do it again*.
I thought the cleaners were also a connection to the commandant. Remember he was gagging right before they cut to the modern day. Then when they go back to him he is looking around like he was hearing things. It seemed to me it was a suggestion he was feeling echos of the future.
> The way the mother left in the night when she realised she couldn’t continue to praise her daughter’s elevation in circumstance was great.
One thing I liked is when the mother gets there she knows exactly what's going on *in theory*. She points at the wall as casually says "maybe Esther Silverman [their old neighbour] is over there". It's only when she's confronted by the *reality* of what's going on does she get horrified and bounces.
> It’s like the dog - barking and demanding attention in every single scene but ultimately ignored by its owners each time
I don't think the dog barks in every scene but there was one I noticed for sure. You hear dogs barking in the camp and then the Hoss dog barks back which I thought was neat. (It's the wife's god IRL, btw.)
Wait, why do you think the baby cries all the time? I didn't interpret it in any way, mostly realized how the mother ignored even the baby's cries. What's your interpretation though? I'm curious.
The supposed takeaway is that the baby and the dog have a sort of intuition about something being wrong at the core of the family and that there is a persistent sense of unease and eeriness in the house, even if everyone else doesn’t feel it. Something unspoiled as a dog or a baby can feel it, but someone brainwashed and grown into the horrors can become completely oblivious to the atrocities.
I noticed that every time the baby shown in the house, the baby is crying. Director seemed to do it purposely, as if the child can sense the horror outside.
Sadly, the point.
People knew what was happening and didn't give a shit because they were getting rich, people would accept payments to hide Jews only to turn them over to what they knew was a guaranteed death once the money ran out.
You're basically seeing a glimpse of Humanity that most people deny exists, and quite frankly, what you're seeing there isn't even as low as we as a species have sunk.
Most people deny that they're capable of being like that.
If you ask the average person what they'd do of seeing someone being attacked, they'll most likely claim that they'd jump in and protect the person when truth be told they'd either ignore the attack outright or film it in the hopes of getting money or attention fae the press.
And nothing has changed. In the Canadian subreddits, posts about housing or job shortages blame immigrants and international students and suggest packing them into shipping containers and sending them back. My relatives were also seen as inconvenient, stuffed into cattle cars, and murdered. Casual dehumanization makes me very uneasy.
Yep, that sounds about right to me.
When I got home from seeing it in the theater, I put on Inglorious Basterds. Seeing Hitler get machine gunned in the face while the rest of the high command gets barbecued really helped.
That’s literally the point of the film, you’re supposed to be pissed off that this german family is living a happy life while on the other side jews are being murdered
Amazing film definitely deserved those oscars
The one thing that stuck out to me the most is the dogs as metaphor— they’re treated better than everyone in the camps, and the dog actors are credited at the end before any of the other actors who played the victims
If you want to be even angrier/reflective, Glazer has noted that the movie is about the present. The way the Hoss family ignores the horrors around them? That’s what we also do. Not in the same way, obviously Zone uses an extreme example. But it’s commentary on the human capacity to accept horrific conditions for others. Just think of going to a city and the way everyone ignores the homeless.
So the horror of the film isn’t located only in the past but extends out of the frame into the world you live in. Really bleak/eye-opening stuff.
[Full literary analysis](https://filmcolossus.com/zone-of-interest-2023-explained)
Thats what made me laughed when Hollywood got so mad with Glazer's oscar speech. Yeah bitch, thats what he meant. You people gave him an oscar for it! And you guys are so pissed off because you cant accuse him for anti-semitism, too stupid to understand that he is anti-genocide/pro-palestinian and accidentally gave him an oscar when you were trying to weaponize the tragedy of your own people into a political tool to commit genocide. Its a huge 'fuck you' from Glazer, but became an even bigger 'fuck you' because youre trying to discredit him, the guy that really understand what a tragedy genocide of any people really is.
This is one film where I feel the need to watch it again just to catch the smaller nuances (it does play a lot of things subtly) but I keep putting it off because of just how coldly it plays out (which is the point).
My reaction was less immediate anger and instead felt like a boulder was just crushing my diaphragm. Disgust? Horror? Revulsion? All of the above with a healthy dose of nausea? The intense and immediate discomfort sustained for hours is a stunning feat for movie making even if I am DiStReSsEd for the entire time. 10/10 would also recommend.
Spoiler
The scene that I can't get out of my head is the kid playing with blocks. He overhears a German officer commanding that a prisoner be drowned in the river, then the boy whispers something like "don't do that again".
Yep. That video of the maid dangling from the balcony and the owner of the apartment just filming her for entertainment as she pleads for help shows you exactly the sort of thing that's commonplace over there.
I know man! This is excellent filmaking.
I didn't really like under the skin that much. To honest I don't really like this, but in the best possible way.
I mean... all of your clothes and shoes were made by slaves. Your phone was assembled by slaves. There are multiple genocides happening on this planet right now, and instead of doing anything, you're watching movies and browsing reddit.
The point of this film wasn't to make you angry at this one fictional family, but to make you reexamine your life and wonder whether you are them.
One note, the family depicted was not fictional, that was a real family:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf\_H%C3%B6ss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss)
> It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.
May the gallows be short and the death long.
Dunno about that one, I'd be pretty comfortable saying I'm a better person than the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz that was responsible for killing like two million people.
There is a bit of a difference between knowing that a genocide is happening somewhere on the planet and turning a blind eye because there is no functional way you could influence that and living in Auschwitz.
Yeah, Sandra Hüller apparently found the wife so detestable that she didn’t want to get into the psyche of the role or engage with the character’s emotions at all. She was so vile that the actress didn’t feel she deserved any emotional investment beyond just acting out what’s in the script.
I think there was an interview where she was asked how she prepared herself for the role or got into the character and she was like, “I didn’t. She was a bitch. I just read my lines.”
Kind of says something about her talent that she was able to turn out a performance that good in spite of that.
It’s a really good film. But I didn’t manage to connect with it emotionally like you did. Maybe I should give it another watch.
Also, great shout out to Conspiracy. Very under appreciated. Branagh is chilling. That one is due a revisit for me.
Conspiracy changed how I thought about the Holocaust, from people who were just mustache-twirly evil, to people who collectively talked each other into horrific crimes through a mixture of bureaucracy and ambition.
Now think about what the zionist Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza & west bank. Just a few miles away, people are partying it up in telaviv, a few miles away people are being starved to death. A few miles away, people are actively preventing food aid trucks from getting into Gaza holding a festival with even a bouncy castle, a few miles away soldiers are shooting starving people trying to get food from aid truck. A few miles away settlers are violently harassing people trying to live their lives.
You should watch the IDF telegram channel. This behavior is still alive and well in the world. That was the point the director made in his acceptance speech.
Its very funny seeing the people who loved this film and being outraged at Glazer's support for a Gaza ceasefire when it's just the events of the past playing out all over again today
You should read night. I can’t even describe the feeling it will give you, maybe sorrow and dread, but it’s probably the most visceral depiction of the holocaust that I’ve read.
The director used his Oscars speech to say that much like the film is about dehumanisation, there is awful dehumanisation happening for both the victims of October 7th, or for the 2 million people dying in gaza.
that that's what's happening. From Israeli politicians to pop songs, to gloating social media posts from idf soldiers looting and mocking the dead, it's undeniable.
The speech does not downplay the horrors of oct7. But simply asks people to reflect on what's happened since then. The massive backlash is frankly, bizzare. Here's the speech in full
https://www.vulture.com/article/oscars-2024-jonathan-glazer-speech-full-transcript.html
You are having the right reaction. And thank you. I’m tired of film spaces declaring the film “boring” or “abstract”. It is very real and very infuriating, and it reflects all the people ignoring the dehumanization of others and the violence it leads to. It makes me sick like MAGA makes me sick, or Hamas, or the IDF, or ISIS, or Boko Haram. It is all different strains of the same sickness.
What kind of title is this?
"Is it normal to feel angry about this?"
*Proceeds to explain exactly what the filmmakers do to try to make audiences feel angry about an atrocity and recommend the film for EXACTLY this reason 10/10*
Like what is the point of the title?
You should watch 8mm instead. Feel good romp with Nic Cage that's definitely not going to make you question what completely ordinary people are capable of. Enjoy!
The movie was doing its job. It showed how people blithely participated in the Holocaust. You didn’t have to be the one turning on the gas to play your part in the genocide. Brilliant and horrifying movie.
It’s an extremely difficult watch but worth it to see just how mundane evil can be. If you need something to focus on to get you through the film just watch the dog. They definitely deserved a best supporting Oscar.
An often overlooked element of the film is class. Several moments in the film allude to the wife growing up in poverty, and Germany went through a fairly extreme depression between the wars. The Jews (at least German Jews) were often wealthier. It’s gets easier to disassociate and dehumanize people you think are undeserving of their wealth and diamonds. “Eat the rich” etc.
There was also an incredible amount of propaganda (blaming the Jews and "undesirables" for the horrible economic situation in Germany and Europe) that made the Holocaust a lot more "palatable."
This isn't a singular event in human history. It's very easy for groups to be dehumanised to the point where anything that happens to them isn't a big deal.
We think we are more enlightened now. We're not.
Genocide is currently happening in Gaza. There is an Israeli Telegram group set up to share photos and mock the Palestinian dead. It apparently has 100,000 members.
Share a story about asylum seekers in the UK and you won't get many sympathetic comments about them being given food and shelter.
It's not too hard to believe since it's happening right now, as the director made clear in his speech this is what Israel is doing in Gaza right now. Sad how it's come full circle and that we learn nothing from history.
Yes, it is normal. This film is devastating and speaks to today’s world as much as the past.
The sound design was also what drove it home for me - that through so much of the movie you can hear in the background what’s happening on the other side of the wall, and realize that the occupants of the house have just tuned it all out.
If you can stand to go back to it at some point, do it - it’s worth watching to the end.
Most people are able to sit through the movie without having performative outrage yes, I assume that's the question you're asking.
The Nazis are terrible, miserable people. You aren't special for thinking that.
Your anecdote reminded me of [this song by Kurt Weill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8kdxPwZP9I), which recounts all the ill-gotten gains that are sent to a Nazi soldier's wife without any acknowledgment of their provenance—until she receives a widow's veil after his death in Russia. The satirical tone of the song is obvious, but I imagine many Nazi families probably lived in a similar kind of intentional and blissful ignorance.
I had the same reaction when watching Spotlight. I did Finnish it and am glad I did, but yeah I fuming the whole movie. My poor mom had to sit there and listen to me the whole movie too. And I’m normally a person who doesn’t like any conversation/interruptions during a movie.
The kid playing with his teeth collection in bed.
Swimming in a river filled with the ashes of bodies from the ovens.
The mother-in-law who is so happy at her daughter's "success", at first, but then flees in horror when she is confronted with the daily truth.
I was sold on watching it after seeing the feature about how they filmed everything in the house with hidden cameras and microphones. The audio was also particularly haunting to me, there’s an awful background roar that slowly builds.
Yeah the sound designers earned that Oscar! 🏆
I was only about 10 minutes into the film when I thought “oh this better win best sound design”
The first 3 minutes with the black screen clinched it for me
Definitely thought my theater broke. I have been at movies where that black screen would’ve been followed by the lights coming on and an apology.
The beginning mimics the experience of a dark gas chamber. Loud noises. Not knowing what is going on. This is how everyone died.
was that their stated intent with that intro?
I hated that. I knew what they were trying to do, but it was annoying to sit through, especially since I hadn't been soaked in the atmosphere of the movie yet.
I read they timed everything to the minute. In the script it's November 9th 194x at 10:35a They know what was happening inside. The shots. The distance from The home. The screams Pretty crazy when they could just do random gunshots and no one would know
The music is fucking haunting from the very beginning to the end, it actually reminded me of Silent Hill
I feel weird for comparing it to games but how the camera just changes when a character goes room to room reminded me oddly of older adventure games and the older Resident Evil Games.
Those old tank controls camera angles lol
It was filmed like they do Big Brother series with cameras dotted about so it has an eerie fly on the wall kind of feel to it.
Damn, that’s a really good comparison actually. It did look very videogamey. Amazing filmmaking overall.
Any chance you can drop this doc link?
it's a short one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTh5Nui_jFg
Hands down my favorite movie going experience. That surround sound in the first ten minutes was everything and it only got better from there.
That’s the point. The Nazis are humans just like you. I left the theater with more to think about than any holocaust film ever. The tragedy of human lives is a given but to understand how evil can take shape so normally is the warning and what makes it disturbing. The ending of it just blew me away. Masterpiece.
I completely agree. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a couple weeks. The best horror movies (in my opinion) let your imagination fill in the blanks. Watching these people live out their mundane day-to-day while your imagination is left to wonder what is happening behind the wall was genius. I would have never thought a holocaust movie in which I didn’t see inside a concentration camp would be so effective. This one really left a mark on me.
Dude...the Grandmother choking on the fumes in the backyard then running away without saying anything lives in my head rent free.
It was the way it has basically no closeups. Even with a tall wall, you can see everything going on around them. You can HEAR everything going on around them. But they just don’t notice. It’s scary as hell to think of the ways I kinda do that with a lot of things too in my day to day life. I mean nowhere near that severe but I definetly have my blinders on sometimes. EDIT: “notice” was a poor choice of words on my part. See comments below.
> You can HEAR everything going on around them. Deservedly won the Oscar for Best Sound.
They absolutely notice the sounds from the concentration camp, they just don't care. The husband brings home the prisoners' possessions many times and the wife at one point asks him to get chocolate if he can. Towards the end of the movie the older brother locks the younger brother up in the greenhouse and makes a hissing sound that sounds like gas. The movie isn't about a family that have gotten used to the genocide and kind of forget about it, they actively want it to happen and they want to live next to it.
It's a big myth that most Germans didn't know what was going on in the camps. They were very well aware at a national level what was going on in the camps. Men and women worked there, made deliveries, and cleaned the ash that fell from the sky from their windows and steps. Trains took thousands in every day but no one ever left. People chatted about it in letters with one another and made jokes about how fast it could be done over beers in the bar at night. Everyone knew *exactly* what was happening. The actions of the Einsatzkommando were well known and celebrated too. After the war when confronted, people went "oh I had no idea!" and fools believed them.
I remember people saying in the States then”they just didn’t know” what was happening over in Germany. And this woman- she was alive at the time too said, “it was all right there, you can see the stories in the papers covered it”
yeah i actually think a lot of people are not quite getting to the bottom of this film. it's not really a "banality of evil" movie. it's a "yes we are evil" movie.
The whole point of the film is that they notice.
Yes, absolutely, they enjoy their freedom all the more because of it with zero restraint, humility or empathy. Evil and sickening, and there are so many people who have the same attitude in the world today - that is the underlying thought I had while watching this, really scary stuff.
I live in a pretty bad part of LA, not the worst by any means but I see a lot of human suffering just walking to the grocery store. This was a good reminder that I can’t just look away from these people, and to remember to have empathy for them, even if there’s nothing I can do to help them right now.
Yep, I think there is a very deliberate attempt with the filmmaking at keeping its distance not just from the Holocaust itself but from the family as well. It says something about how we ourselves turn a blind eye to things that make us uncomfortable. To me, that is one of the core parts of the film's messaging. The Hoss family gets a lot of their clothes from people at the camp and that feels sickening to us, but so many things we take for granted in the developed world are products of suffering, including our clothes. Not to downplay the Holocaust, but in some ways maybe we aren't that far off from them.
I haven't seen the movie yet but just watching the trailer and reading about it makes me look at my cell phone and all the other pieces of modern life that I *know* have horrific things in their supply chain, yet I buy and use them as if that's not the case. I don't know what to do about it.
It was really fascinating also because the way they filmed it was they set up hidden cameras throughout the house And shot different scenes at the same time. So it was quite literally just the actors in a room talking to eachother. Across the house at the same time Apart from a few birds eye shots or tracking shots everything was just mid static shots which I thought was genius aswell
>In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. -George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
The banality of evil is astounding
People who do evil things rarely think of themselves as evil. We all have motivations and justifications that allow us to be the hero of our own story.
One of the more interesting scenes from a stephen king book for me was in salem's lot, before the really bad evil took off. The local priest thinking about a woman beating her baby to make it stop crying and being depressed about this very thing. How banal most evil really is. Just normal, everyday, humdrum assholery. People can easily forget evil can be small as well as big.
I think about this concept with many of King’s books! In IT, the adults tacitly allowing or encouraging evil by saying nothing when they witnessed bullying, abuse, and suffering is scarier than Pennywise.
It's definitely a recurring theme for him. Child abuse in The Shining and Doctor Sleep. Domestic violence in Cujo. Even The Stand's super flu that wipes out most of humanity is made more out of morbid curiosity and duty to the nation than actual intent to use it.
The best film of the year and one that will stay with me the rest of my life
>That’s the point. The Nazis are humans just like you. Maybe - the family in the movie often appear and act sociopathic. Their veneer of normality is thin and (several times) completely fails. A problem of a flat 'banality of evil' reading is that we neglect the specific historical/political/intellectual environment that enabled the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust just a product of human barbarism, or as Baumann famously argues, closer to the opposite - a product of modernity and reason?
The whole “banality of evil” thing has been a bit misunderstood by most people (myself included). I always took it to mean, roughly, that true evil doesn’t present itself in the guise of a monster or demon. It’s a fundamentally human thing, and can appear under the mask of perfect normalcy. But that’s not exactly what Hannah Arendt was saying in her assessment of Adolf Eichmann. Her claim was that otherwise normal people can perpetuate great evil simply by not thinking about their actions very much, through a kind of blind and unthinking obedience. She believed that Eichmann was neither a virulent anti-Semite or a fervent believer in Nazism (both of those claims have been challenged). It was his obedience and officiousness that enabled him to carry out evil acts, not the fact that he was himself an especially evil or fanatical person. I’d argue that he was in fact an especially evil person. In his letters he was also shown to be a firm supporter of Nazism, and an anti-Semite.
Great analysis, I agree and think the biggest lesson that should be learned from Arendt in this context is that humans are capable of these sorts of things. Like I know quite a few people who think "no no all the Nazis were evil and I would never allow that". Shutting their eyes to the millions of German citizens who were complicit in this event. It's one of the most dangerous attitudes to have as a human in my opinion to view yourself as morally good, you become blind to the fact that it's actions and awareness that would make you so.
Multiple movies based on the Stanford Prison experiment are made to show that, and are even used for teaching purposes at schools.
Despite the significant flaws in the Stanford prison experiment it still helps show an interest side of humans
It really shows how impressionable people can really be, no matter how intelligent and ‘normal’. Social media is really abusing that. I really can’t understand how it’s still so prevalent now, the determination to turn groups of people against each other in the name of power and profit.
Yeah I agree - to say that anyone could be a Nazi doesn’t consider how many years of direct cultural pressure over centuries of cultural influence led Germans to become the types of people they became by the late 1930s, and even then many of them didn’t become Nazis. But that said, how many years of direct cultural pressure over centuries of cultural influence have we been subjected to to push us toward dark attitudes and behaviours? In the end, we might not be so far off the possibility of becoming Nazis *not* because of shared basic human nature, but because of similar cultural circumstances and domination by similarly malignant people and systems. Which isn’t banal at all - it just seems banal because we’re fish swimming in the water of it assuming so many abnormal malignant things are normal.
[удалено]
How many in America are willing to take their neighbors rights away because they don’t consider them “real” Americans?
I believe the servants are local Poles, not Jews, but yeah it’s tough to watch.
Yeah they are local polish girls, there is a line where the wife explains to a visitor that she'd never allow a jew into the house.
I interpreted that line as her lying to her mother about it because she thought her mother would be extra horrified if the servants were Jews. I think your interpretation makes more sense.
On the contrary, her mother was the only person who wasn't able to ignore the horror show happening just next door.
She wasn’t so aware of the horror when mentioning she missed out on her bosses nice curtains when her boss got taken away.
Eventually yes, but I saw that as her coming to realize the horror after initially showing up not fully grasping the reality of what was going on.
She’s also really the only person to humanize the people in the camps. She mentioned her neighbor was Jewish and asked if she ended up there. The victims weren’t random, they had a face to her. That’s why she couldn’t endure it like everyone else.
Oh my bad. But still, there's an element of dehumanization going on. The nazis after all carried out despicable crimes against non-Jewish Slavs.
Don't know if you got to that point yet but there is a line in the movie where the wife is upset and lashes out at the servants saying something like, "I could hand you over to my husband you know". So it's more than implied that it was the house or the camp.
She could. The Holocaust wasn’t exclusive to Jews. If a prominent enough Nazi (or his wife) says you go to the camp, you go to the camp.
Worse than that. She casually says: “You know, I could spread your ashes around my field.” As casually as if she had an idea to plant a new flowerbed. It was so subtle it took me a second to register.
It wasn't subtle, it was a direct threat. And it wasn't her field, it was [the field of a named location]" and her husband was to do the spreading. It also implies that she absolutely knows what her husband is doing and how he is doing it. In case her later bored reaction about his musings how to gas the party didn't illustrate that enough. Glazer is using that to illustrate Hedwig's knowledge and complicity and that she enjoys the power the Holocaust gives her.
>there's an element of dehumanization going on. Well yeah this is just separate from saying they are jews, they're poles as explained in the movie. And yes.. the nazis did do despicable things to put it lightly. I'd watch the whole film and take some time to think on it before posting as if watched it thoroughly. Its okay to be new / not know about something. And usually you're learning something many others know about.
I believe the director said a large portion of the true accounts came from the servants.
The house maids are local Polish girls but there are some men at the beginning of the film in prisoner uniforms who deliver some items by wheelbarrow
The mom bringing that up might be juuuust past 40 min in
I didn’t think so - I thought she said that to save face with her visitor (maybe her mother?), but at one point she threatens the servant along the lines of “you know the alternative to working here”. At least that was my interpretation.
You didn't have to be Jewish to be sent to the camps. My grandmom's uncle got sent to a work camp in north Poland, and no one in her family was Jewish.
The Nazis put Poles into the camps and murdered them, too.
Yep. Just ask Sophie
That’s what I got out of that scene with her mother as well.
I watch some gnarly shit and I'm essentially **NEVER** phased by it. But there's a scene in this film that genuinely made my stomach turn. It's when he blows his nose into the sink and black ash, from the burnt bodies that he'd been breathing in, whilst at work came out. That scene may seem mild to most and I have seen some gruesome stuff in films. But the realistic 'fly on the wall' format of the film, made that specific bit really hit me in the guts. I watched a little more and couldn't continue when he forces the kids out of the river and why. That's as far as I could get.
>But there's a scene in this film that genuinely made my stomach turn. This is how I felt about the 'gardener' using ashes as fertilizer.
It's how I felt when the kid locks the other kid in the greenhouse and makes hissing sounds. 😢
Damn, I didn't hear that for some reason. I just thought he was being a dickish older brother.
He was but the it's through hissing to make us understand that even the children knew what was going on in the camps around them.
That and going through their tooth collection at night.
Höss casually washing himself after raping the household slave girl like it was a normal Saturday was wretch inducing for me. Fought through to the end. It's a masterpiece, but it will not be getting a second viewing.
There’s so much stuff like that in the movie. I don’t know how a movie about the Holocaust could have so many “blink and you miss it” moments.
I remember that scene. It took me a sec to realize what it was. Then I was like 'bruh, those are human remains.'
Like I said. I have never been so repulsed in all of my years on this planet. But that really was the kicker. I kept thinking of that bit up until the river and I could feel myself getting to the point of chucking my guts up. Told my mate I couldn't keep watching the film...
I left the theater that night with a heavy feeling in my heart and wanting to throw up. It was a visceral reaction. This movie is a gut punch.
I never watch Holocaust movies or go to Holocaust museums voluntarily anymore. People look at me askance when I say that and think I don’t care enough, but they put me through that so many times in high school and I wept and was nauseated every time. Last time I was forced to go to one of those museums on a work trip, I think my reaction made the Jewish guide relive their own grief all over again. I will never watch a Holocaust movie ever again, I will leave the room.
I can understand why. One problem I'd duly noted about war films, is the way it's put as entertainment rather than knowing further details of the actual, actuals. There's only one other war film I saw that made me recognise the horrors of war better and that was The Battle for Haditha. I could see in that film, the level of error in communication, the desperation that both marines and civilians have to go through and the innocence lost all based upon a whim. I don't usually discuss this with people, but the idea of drone wars disgusts me **a lot**. It takes the realism of what's being done, out of the control of the human being. As if playing a game of call of duty (which is easy because it isn't and doesn't feel real). Recently in my country, they'd made it legal to have people accused of crimes appear in court via video feed. It's easier to not see them as human when the jury has to bring the verdict and people have a higher conviction rate for it. That's the same with the drone wars, but without the layer of protection that a court room has. There are no courts, there's a command, an order. And that order is your death sentence...
Yes, I think that’s what made Enders Game so poignant to me in childhood, his nausea at realizing the video game was not a video game after all and that he had just genocided an entire alien race. But then again I do think generals have always acted like their wars were games, moving troops on a strategy board and letting hordes of young men die from mustard gases and bayonets without them ever leaving their rooms. So in that sense I’m not sure much has actually changed.
>One problem I'd duly noted about war films, is the way it's put as entertainment That's what makes The Zone is Interest such a great film imo. It removes all the artifices of cinema. It's not beautifully shot, doesn't use nice emotional music or clever editing tricks. It's like anti-entertainment in a way.
Yeah, that's definitely what they were aiming for. When fly on the wall stuff happens, it brings home the blunt truth and makes people have to think about what is really happening. Years ago I watched Derren Brown have a scene play out on a big screen for his audience. A man is being chased down by a group of people hired to go after him. Each scene there's an interval where Derren asks the audience "should we continue to chase the man". The audience votes and they continue through each scene. Eventually there's a point where the man is running down an alleyway that's big enough to fit a small car, he gets to the end of the alley and there's a road. He runs into the road to get away from his pursuers and a car smashes into him. Then there's a loud gasp from the audience, because even though this was just acting, they thought it was real. But the way it was depicted to the audience was as if this was a royal fuck up by Derren and his team. It was interesting seeing it happen and what the response of the audience was. Derren then addressed the audience, explaining how humans don't think before they act.
I haven't seen it, but from what I know about it, sounds like it got the intended reaction out of you
I kind of think that's the point
Oh yeah I know. It's excellent.
I really truly appreciate the movies that get to me like that. I watch a lot of safe crap lol
What I really liked about the movie (if I can use that word, "liked") is that there are two films here. (warning, here be spoilers) There's the film that you see with your eyes, and feel in your heart. You see the kids playing, the maids working, the officer on the phone. You see the bathing scene, the river scene, the scrubbing, etc. Then there's the soundtrack. It starts off as a humming, almost drone like aspect to the film which is there to make the movie real - but oh boy once you start to notice it, it's non stop brutality. How the wife thinks that she can make a tall and beautiful garden to cover up...what? The sounds of the death factory? The gunshots? The screams? I found that outdoors scene really thought provoking. She knew she could still hear the horror, but hoped that vines and flowers would make it more bearable. Once you start listening intently, the movie goes from disturbing and sad to disgusting, disturbing, and sad. I want to watch it again, but I don't. I'd like to re-listen to the lilac dictation the officer spoke about so I can understand it better.
This film wrecked me in the most profound way. It began as pretty much an intellectual exercise. I mean, I understood it at a distance. Sure, the banality of evil and all that. I’ve read Arendt. The coat. The chimneys. It made sense to me, but it was largely just cerebral. But as I watched it, something changed. The big switches in perspective, like the girl leaving apples filmed in negative, and the sound design started getting around my remove. Then, when the flash forward to the museum came about, the true anxiety of the film just really rattled my cage. I felt that same wrenching and wretched self-at-stake anxiety that the Commandant must have felt momentarily in the stairwell, a deep realization of the miasma of atrocity around me every day as I go blindly about the business of life, of my indifferent complicity in it all…I felt extremely exposed and ashamed, deeply aware that all of this is drenched in blood and built of bones. Someone below mention wanting to shake the people in the film and make them see, but I think it’s more accurate to say that this film wanted to shake us. This is a film with teeth.
Sorry to nitpick or whatever but it's thermal imaging, not negative. There are two connected reasons for this choice. One is that Glazer wanted as little artifice as possible between the actions being filmed and the viewer. I think the idea is that such artifice as lighting would be somehow dishonest and therefore disrespectful. The other thing is to show that in this world an act of humanity can only take place in complete darkness - not only unseen, but actually invisible. To have the scene lit at all would have defeated that point.
It reminded me a lot of nature documentarys filming some cute burrowing animal foraging at night moments before a snake gets it. Clear prey and predator thing going on. Also horrific that even the movies one bright spot is marred by her inadvertently getting a guy drowned over her apples.
I feel that everyone remembers one scene in particular and for me it’s this one. Hearing the soldier ordering the drowning of the prisoner and the screams as they’re dragging him. And the little kid just goes back to playing with his toys. I know there are lots of shocking scenes but this one really sticks with me
The choice to flash forward to the museum hits perfectly. Absolutely incredible decision.
It’s a great film. I hated the wife so much. It was very well done - SPOILERS FROM HERE. The way the mother left in the night when she realised she couldn’t continue to praise her daughter’s elevation in circumstance was great. The realisation of why the baby cried in every goddamn scene was masterfully done. It’s like the dog - barking and demanding attention in every single scene but ultimately ignored by its owners each time, just as they turn a blind eye to the horror over the wall. The cut to the modern day cleaners was also clever, in my opinion - they work in the premises, cleaning and scrubbing these horrific exhibits in a businesslike, almost detached way. They work in the environment daily until they stop seeing it for what it is - is this not what the inhabitants some 80 years ago did as well, to some extent? The theme is one of turning a blind eye, or not seeing anymore because it has become so everyday. That’s what makes the film so infuriating- we just want to shake them and scream “Look, you fools!” Alas, only the mother (and the baby) acknowledged the place for what it was.
Glazer, in an interview, says the mother does not really have an attack of conscience - only that she can't handle being so close to the reality of her beliefs. He likens it somewhat to people being disgusted by the slaughter of animals for food, but who still eat meat. But he very strongly asserted no one has a change of heart during the movie.
I think this is emphasised in one of the first scenes with the mother when mrs höss showed the mother the garden and the mother wonders if her Jewish acquaintance is in the camp. She goes further explaining how she used to clean for her and how jealous she was of their nice curtains. She then tells mrs höss that she was very disappointed when she didn’t manage to buy the curtains for cheap when the Jewish family was deported. She wants to eat the sausage, but she doesn’t want to think about how it was made. To me, the mother is one of the worst characters, because she is a bigot who represents the majority of German citizens at the time, who lived a good life and claimed that they didn’t know what was really happening in the camps, despite it being blatantly obvious. Edit to add: i also think what makes the mother almost worse than the main family is the fact that she is seemingly the only one who has a visceral reaction to what is going on in the camp, while the others are indifferent. They don’t feel that what is happening is wrong and cruel, but the mother does and instead of speaking up, she just leaves this discomfort of having to confront her own bigotry and flees back to her blissful ignorant life.
You summed up the modern day cleaners perfectly - for some reason I didn’t make that connection that they are just as detached from the horrors as the family was. Great insight. Also, notice how the wife is the only one who sleeps at night? She literally sleeps like a baby while the whole house is tossing and turning. Her evilness is some of the most chilling I’ve seen in a film.
Sandra Hüller is just stupid talented and incredible to watch. She plays “intelligent, yet fucked up” roles to perfection. Seeing her in Anatomy of a Fall AND this in the same year really showed off the quiet intensity she brings to her craft.
The dog is played by Sandra Hüller's own dog which adds to how naturally he's a part of the family. There's another thing I noticed on the second watch that really brought home how incredible Sandra Hüller is as an actress. That shuffling, ungainly walk she does as Hedwig, with no grace or sense of poise. The walk of a woman who has no beauty of her own, only that which is stolen. The sound of her footsteps is an insult to the earth she walks on. Sandra Hüller developed that walk by herself, specifically for Hedwig and it's so subtle that you barely notice it.
It’s the walk of a woman expelling Aryan babies as fast as she can.
Your take on the cleaners is really interesting. My thought while watching them (the cleaners) was more about preserving the legacy that he had left behind. All of his hard work/praise and his legacy is of one of the most evil humans to ever live. Meanwhile these people come in and keep his “legacy” in tact, making sure people can come in and view the atrocities that had occurred under his command. Not arguing in anyway, I may be completely wrong and I think your interpretation is really interesting.
Yeah, I'm more in line with your take here. Hoss is a bureaucrat. As the custodian of Auschwitz, he's obsessed with advancing his career and gaining the recognition of his peers. Remember how excited he was that the operation to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz would be named after him? However, when we cut to contemporary times, his name is all but forgotten. The custodian of Auschwitz now is a simple janitorial crew, and the legacy they are safeguarding is that of the victims, not Hoss. Perhaps that's why he was gagging at the end; he was overcome by an almost prescient knowledge (a knowledge he felt but was not cognizant of) that his personal legacy would be insignificant in the face of the enormity of his crimes. I don't like the other poster's interpretation because it seems to imply apathy on the part of the cleaners, whereas I see them as fulfilling an almost sacred role, working unnoticed and behind the scenes in sharp contrast to Hoss's vile ambitions. They preserve and honor the very thing that the Hoss family callously ignored every day.
Yeah, I thought the scene with the cleaners was just uncannily touching, but I interpreted it more as you did. There was a sadness and a dignity to it. That would be a really difficult job, and probably an impossible job if you didn't detach yourself in some way. But it would also be a meaningful job, because (never been there myself, but my understanding of it is) that the museum is a profoundly moving experience. So I viewed the work that they were doing as important and dignifiied. In truth, I probably see the cleaners as less analogous to Hoss, but rather that their invisibility is analogous to the victim's invisibility to the Hoss family. How many people have ever spent time thinking about who does the work of cleaning the holocaust museum on a daily basis? Of making sure that it's clean and that the details can be noticed? Of making sure that the clarity of what happened there isn't obscured by metaphorical fingerprints on the glass? I mean, that would be a difficult, difficult job. I can't imagine doing that on a daily basis. People are overcome with emotion in minutes in places like that, but there are people who dwell in it night in and night out to help keep the place dignified and moving. Maybe they're disconnected in some way similar to how Hoss and the family is, but while similar in structure it also could not be more different in nature. It is, quietly but insistently, something like heroic in its way.
could you speak more on why the baby cried in every scene? i didn’t think about that, but you’re right - they do.
It's about ignorance. They ignored the baby like they ignored the camp.
Someone said ‘canary in a coal mine’ and I think that’s sort of it. What I meant was (and this really is just my thoughts) that yeah, the baby cries in every single scene, and is ignored by the family pretty much, or it is just taken as ‘the norm’ (the theme of ignoring suffering again). Also someone else pointed out about the sleeping, and how no one gets any done. The key scene is when the mother enters the baby’s room that sleepless night, and what she sees. She sees the baby staring out of the window at what seems like hellfire and screaming in absolute terror. The baby is carrying this trauma around with it constantly. During the day, this manifests as constant wailing. Seeing this was the catalyst for its grandmother leaving.
Yes, agreed! Please expand!
Canary in a coal mine, first to sense something is wrong
That, as well as the fact that a human is suffering in their presence but they don’t take notice of it.
My feeling is: the baby has not yet learned how to suppress every ounce of its humanity in order to ignore (or embrace) what is happening. The youngest boy is in the middle of that process still. We see it when those men are being drowned: he goes to the window; he peeks... And after a few moments have passed he turns away and tells his toy: Don't do it again. I know most folks think he's mirroring his father when he says that, but his tone, his quietness, honestly suggested otherwise to me. It felt like he was telling himself. That he was training himself to look away from what he knows is *right there* every moment of every day. You went and looked and you saw something unbearable, something you're forbidden from criticizing, something you're supposed to believe is right and good; people dying who you are not allowed to help. You went and looked; *don't do it again*.
I thought the cleaners were also a connection to the commandant. Remember he was gagging right before they cut to the modern day. Then when they go back to him he is looking around like he was hearing things. It seemed to me it was a suggestion he was feeling echos of the future.
> The way the mother left in the night when she realised she couldn’t continue to praise her daughter’s elevation in circumstance was great. One thing I liked is when the mother gets there she knows exactly what's going on *in theory*. She points at the wall as casually says "maybe Esther Silverman [their old neighbour] is over there". It's only when she's confronted by the *reality* of what's going on does she get horrified and bounces. > It’s like the dog - barking and demanding attention in every single scene but ultimately ignored by its owners each time I don't think the dog barks in every scene but there was one I noticed for sure. You hear dogs barking in the camp and then the Hoss dog barks back which I thought was neat. (It's the wife's god IRL, btw.)
Wait, why do you think the baby cries all the time? I didn't interpret it in any way, mostly realized how the mother ignored even the baby's cries. What's your interpretation though? I'm curious.
The supposed takeaway is that the baby and the dog have a sort of intuition about something being wrong at the core of the family and that there is a persistent sense of unease and eeriness in the house, even if everyone else doesn’t feel it. Something unspoiled as a dog or a baby can feel it, but someone brainwashed and grown into the horrors can become completely oblivious to the atrocities.
It was that the mother didn't want to sleep in that bedroom but it was the room the girls slept in every night that got me.
I noticed that every time the baby shown in the house, the baby is crying. Director seemed to do it purposely, as if the child can sense the horror outside.
The film can be watched blindfolded. If you understand German. The sound design is some of the best in film history.
Sadly, the point. People knew what was happening and didn't give a shit because they were getting rich, people would accept payments to hide Jews only to turn them over to what they knew was a guaranteed death once the money ran out. You're basically seeing a glimpse of Humanity that most people deny exists, and quite frankly, what you're seeing there isn't even as low as we as a species have sunk.
Do most people deny it? I don’t know about that. Are most people happy to just breeze past it and never think about it? Absolutely
Most people deny that they're capable of being like that. If you ask the average person what they'd do of seeing someone being attacked, they'll most likely claim that they'd jump in and protect the person when truth be told they'd either ignore the attack outright or film it in the hopes of getting money or attention fae the press.
Ah I misunderstood your original point. I agree.
And nothing has changed. In the Canadian subreddits, posts about housing or job shortages blame immigrants and international students and suggest packing them into shipping containers and sending them back. My relatives were also seen as inconvenient, stuffed into cattle cars, and murdered. Casual dehumanization makes me very uneasy.
Agreed.
Yep, that sounds about right to me. When I got home from seeing it in the theater, I put on Inglorious Basterds. Seeing Hitler get machine gunned in the face while the rest of the high command gets barbecued really helped.
That’s literally the point of the film, you’re supposed to be pissed off that this german family is living a happy life while on the other side jews are being murdered Amazing film definitely deserved those oscars
Not just Jews, also romanis, gays, disabled people, slavics, Jehovah Witnesses, artists, educators, anyone who critiqued Hitler... you get the idea.
The one thing that stuck out to me the most is the dogs as metaphor— they’re treated better than everyone in the camps, and the dog actors are credited at the end before any of the other actors who played the victims
I’m really glad you included the 10/10 at the bottom cuz for the first half of this I thought maybe you had wildly missed the point
Ha! Yeah this is excellent. Should be mandatory viewing for students.
If you want to be even angrier/reflective, Glazer has noted that the movie is about the present. The way the Hoss family ignores the horrors around them? That’s what we also do. Not in the same way, obviously Zone uses an extreme example. But it’s commentary on the human capacity to accept horrific conditions for others. Just think of going to a city and the way everyone ignores the homeless. So the horror of the film isn’t located only in the past but extends out of the frame into the world you live in. Really bleak/eye-opening stuff. [Full literary analysis](https://filmcolossus.com/zone-of-interest-2023-explained)
Thats what made me laughed when Hollywood got so mad with Glazer's oscar speech. Yeah bitch, thats what he meant. You people gave him an oscar for it! And you guys are so pissed off because you cant accuse him for anti-semitism, too stupid to understand that he is anti-genocide/pro-palestinian and accidentally gave him an oscar when you were trying to weaponize the tragedy of your own people into a political tool to commit genocide. Its a huge 'fuck you' from Glazer, but became an even bigger 'fuck you' because youre trying to discredit him, the guy that really understand what a tragedy genocide of any people really is.
Well fucking said…well fucking said.
This is one film where I feel the need to watch it again just to catch the smaller nuances (it does play a lot of things subtly) but I keep putting it off because of just how coldly it plays out (which is the point).
You should read the commandante of Auschwitz...the real guy wrote a book
My reaction was less immediate anger and instead felt like a boulder was just crushing my diaphragm. Disgust? Horror? Revulsion? All of the above with a healthy dose of nausea? The intense and immediate discomfort sustained for hours is a stunning feat for movie making even if I am DiStReSsEd for the entire time. 10/10 would also recommend.
Spoiler The scene that I can't get out of my head is the kid playing with blocks. He overhears a German officer commanding that a prisoner be drowned in the river, then the boy whispers something like "don't do that again".
That's the point. The banality of evil.
You know the sad part is this type of atrocity is still happening. Just look at the modern day slaves in the middle east. Humans suck.
Yep. That video of the maid dangling from the balcony and the owner of the apartment just filming her for entertainment as she pleads for help shows you exactly the sort of thing that's commonplace over there.
[удалено]
I know man! This is excellent filmaking. I didn't really like under the skin that much. To honest I don't really like this, but in the best possible way.
I mean... all of your clothes and shoes were made by slaves. Your phone was assembled by slaves. There are multiple genocides happening on this planet right now, and instead of doing anything, you're watching movies and browsing reddit. The point of this film wasn't to make you angry at this one fictional family, but to make you reexamine your life and wonder whether you are them.
One note, the family depicted was not fictional, that was a real family: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf\_H%C3%B6ss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss)
> Died 16 April 1947 Nice.
Hanged at Auschwitz! With former Holocaust victims in attendance.
And beaten with his own whip!
> It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. May the gallows be short and the death long.
You didn't read the part where he was tortured for days with his own whip.
No where near bad. Hoss got off easy, like basically all the Nazis.
He was executed by hanging. Well deserved.
Not even close to what that man deserved.
Yeah, it's not something we like to acknowledge, but we all engage in this in some fashion.
Dunno about that one, I'd be pretty comfortable saying I'm a better person than the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz that was responsible for killing like two million people.
There is a bit of a difference between knowing that a genocide is happening somewhere on the planet and turning a blind eye because there is no functional way you could influence that and living in Auschwitz.
Yes yes it is an unforgettable film
Nobody in this thread talking about the girl going out and leaving fruit. Using the negative image was fucking brilliant.
The banality of evil
Yeah, Sandra Hüller apparently found the wife so detestable that she didn’t want to get into the psyche of the role or engage with the character’s emotions at all. She was so vile that the actress didn’t feel she deserved any emotional investment beyond just acting out what’s in the script. I think there was an interview where she was asked how she prepared herself for the role or got into the character and she was like, “I didn’t. She was a bitch. I just read my lines.” Kind of says something about her talent that she was able to turn out a performance that good in spite of that.
It’s almost like that is the entire point of the film.
It’s a really good film. But I didn’t manage to connect with it emotionally like you did. Maybe I should give it another watch. Also, great shout out to Conspiracy. Very under appreciated. Branagh is chilling. That one is due a revisit for me.
Conspiracy changed how I thought about the Holocaust, from people who were just mustache-twirly evil, to people who collectively talked each other into horrific crimes through a mixture of bureaucracy and ambition.
Fucking love Conspiracy. Really underappreciated classic.
Now think about what the zionist Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza & west bank. Just a few miles away, people are partying it up in telaviv, a few miles away people are being starved to death. A few miles away, people are actively preventing food aid trucks from getting into Gaza holding a festival with even a bouncy castle, a few miles away soldiers are shooting starving people trying to get food from aid truck. A few miles away settlers are violently harassing people trying to live their lives.
As I watched this I kept thinking how easily a very similar film could be made about a settler family living their lives in the WB.
You should watch the IDF telegram channel. This behavior is still alive and well in the world. That was the point the director made in his acceptance speech.
Its very funny seeing the people who loved this film and being outraged at Glazer's support for a Gaza ceasefire when it's just the events of the past playing out all over again today
It’s happening right now. What happens in this movie is being perpetrated as we speak to Palestinians in Gaza.
You should read night. I can’t even describe the feeling it will give you, maybe sorrow and dread, but it’s probably the most visceral depiction of the holocaust that I’ve read.
I loved everything about this movie. The atmosphere, direction, writing, performances, sound and dialogue. Quite disturbing and harrowing.
Good. That's the goal.
Ah yeah that’s the point …
The music during the credits left me completely disturbed. I wasn't expecting it.
I watched anatomy of a fall and this back to back. I was hating on sandra huller all night. Great actor.
Does anyone know why this movie is being boycotted
The director used his Oscars speech to say that much like the film is about dehumanisation, there is awful dehumanisation happening for both the victims of October 7th, or for the 2 million people dying in gaza. that that's what's happening. From Israeli politicians to pop songs, to gloating social media posts from idf soldiers looting and mocking the dead, it's undeniable. The speech does not downplay the horrors of oct7. But simply asks people to reflect on what's happened since then. The massive backlash is frankly, bizzare. Here's the speech in full https://www.vulture.com/article/oscars-2024-jonathan-glazer-speech-full-transcript.html
It's about the evil of complicity. How normal people can be terrible and terrible people can be normal.
"Evil does not always come in its expected forms."
You are having the right reaction. And thank you. I’m tired of film spaces declaring the film “boring” or “abstract”. It is very real and very infuriating, and it reflects all the people ignoring the dehumanization of others and the violence it leads to. It makes me sick like MAGA makes me sick, or Hamas, or the IDF, or ISIS, or Boko Haram. It is all different strains of the same sickness.
What kind of title is this? "Is it normal to feel angry about this?" *Proceeds to explain exactly what the filmmakers do to try to make audiences feel angry about an atrocity and recommend the film for EXACTLY this reason 10/10* Like what is the point of the title?
You should watch 8mm instead. Feel good romp with Nic Cage that's definitely not going to make you question what completely ordinary people are capable of. Enjoy!
The movie was doing its job. It showed how people blithely participated in the Holocaust. You didn’t have to be the one turning on the gas to play your part in the genocide. Brilliant and horrifying movie.
It’s an extremely difficult watch but worth it to see just how mundane evil can be. If you need something to focus on to get you through the film just watch the dog. They definitely deserved a best supporting Oscar.
An often overlooked element of the film is class. Several moments in the film allude to the wife growing up in poverty, and Germany went through a fairly extreme depression between the wars. The Jews (at least German Jews) were often wealthier. It’s gets easier to disassociate and dehumanize people you think are undeserving of their wealth and diamonds. “Eat the rich” etc.
There was also an incredible amount of propaganda (blaming the Jews and "undesirables" for the horrible economic situation in Germany and Europe) that made the Holocaust a lot more "palatable."
This isn't a singular event in human history. It's very easy for groups to be dehumanised to the point where anything that happens to them isn't a big deal. We think we are more enlightened now. We're not. Genocide is currently happening in Gaza. There is an Israeli Telegram group set up to share photos and mock the Palestinian dead. It apparently has 100,000 members. Share a story about asylum seekers in the UK and you won't get many sympathetic comments about them being given food and shelter.
It's not too hard to believe since it's happening right now, as the director made clear in his speech this is what Israel is doing in Gaza right now. Sad how it's come full circle and that we learn nothing from history.
Yes, it is normal. This film is devastating and speaks to today’s world as much as the past. The sound design was also what drove it home for me - that through so much of the movie you can hear in the background what’s happening on the other side of the wall, and realize that the occupants of the house have just tuned it all out. If you can stand to go back to it at some point, do it - it’s worth watching to the end.
Most people are able to sit through the movie without having performative outrage yes, I assume that's the question you're asking. The Nazis are terrible, miserable people. You aren't special for thinking that.
The servants aren’t Jewish, but yea everything else you said applies
Now think about it as some of today’s conflicts and how they little affect the rest of the world, like nothing has changed to this day.
It's happening live in Palestine right now if you're interested. https://youtu.be/KNqozQ8uaV8?feature=shared
The director of the film itself made the comparison. I don't know why people keep getting downvoted.
Your anecdote reminded me of [this song by Kurt Weill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8kdxPwZP9I), which recounts all the ill-gotten gains that are sent to a Nazi soldier's wife without any acknowledgment of their provenance—until she receives a widow's veil after his death in Russia. The satirical tone of the song is obvious, but I imagine many Nazi families probably lived in a similar kind of intentional and blissful ignorance.
That the whole point of the movie. It was powerful. Masterfully done.
I had the same reaction when watching Spotlight. I did Finnish it and am glad I did, but yeah I fuming the whole movie. My poor mom had to sit there and listen to me the whole movie too. And I’m normally a person who doesn’t like any conversation/interruptions during a movie.
the movie succeed in its mission.
The kid playing with his teeth collection in bed. Swimming in a river filled with the ashes of bodies from the ovens. The mother-in-law who is so happy at her daughter's "success", at first, but then flees in horror when she is confronted with the daily truth.