Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Some might have thought that the cultural well had run dry on the Holocaust – that writers, filmmakers, and playwrights had said all they could about Hitler’s Germany, having plumbed it so exhaustively as to entrench an existential deterrent to its reprise. But that view assumed that the species was advancing. In the last ten years or so, the late-twentieth-century idea of human progress has taken an obvious hit. The political success of Donald Trump, the MAGA crowd, and their imitators has reanimated the fear of vicious fascism and the warped ethos that allows it to flourish. So Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same title, is not just a brilliantly imagined dramatization of genocidal lunacy compartmentalized within the saccharine Gemütlichkeit that the Nazis idealized and retailed. It is also a cold-eyed warning about the persistent human capacity for morbid normalization.
Glazer fearlessly spurns all exposition and overt moralization, immediately plunging the audience into the pastoral life of a German family enjoying a charmed afternoon by a river, near their lovely rustic home and garden. This cinematic dispensation works to perfection, as it did in Sexy Beast, his improbably divergent first feature and one of the best crime films of past 25 years. From uniforms, gunshots, and smokestacks it gradually emerges that the family is that of a fictionalized Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel, preternaturally phlegmatic), the actual commandant of Auschwitz, whose obdurate wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, eerily immersed) sees their idyllic life as just reward for Aryan fealty to the Third Reich. The Hösses glom the perks of persecution – he procures attractive young Jewish women from the camp to screw, she enslaves a homely one as a housekeeper – as though they are company cars, just part of the package. The children are clueless. Only Hedwig’s mother, who ends a visit early because she is nauseated by the stench of burning bodies, remotely appreciates the depravity of the tableau. When Höss is promoted and assigned to Berlin, Hedwig is crestfallen and refuses to leave their tidy estate. Rudolf tearfully laments separating from his horse. The Höss family is delivered from its cruel fate when Rudolf’s superiors decide that Hungary’s 700,000 Jews will become part of the Final Solution and that he alone can exterminate them with requisite efficiency back at Auschwitz.
If the Hösses’ poison rains from the top down, Eileen Dunlop’s seeps from the bottom up in Eileen, William Oldroyd’s neo-Hitchcockian gem based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s eponymous book and set in pre-counterculture Massachusetts in 1964. Oldroyd is in even less of a hurry than Glazer to clue the audience to percolating horror. At first, the movie tracks as grim New England realism, in the vein of, say, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Eileen (a nicely measured Thomasin McKenzie) is in her twenties, works as a clerk in a prison for teenage boys, has a lousy sex life, and thanklessly cares for her vilely misanthropic and verbally abusive father (Shea Whigham, bringing it), a widower, retired cop, and cirrhotic alcoholic. She understandably fantasizes about killing him and herself. Then she meets Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway, prepossessing but nuanced), the new prison psychiatrist, and becomes infatuated with her, ultimately to the point of obsession. The homoerotic feelings Rebecca elicits in Eileen could be firm or fleeting. What matters is that they unlock her compulsion to act on more dangerous impulses that she has suppressed. In a word, Rebecca liberates her, whether she ends up a serial killer or merely a radical feminist.
Höss emerges from his Berlin office with a spring in his step and descends the dark, immaculate stairs of SS headquarters, puzzled at the bile that intermittently rises to his throat to gag him and unable to retch it out. Eileen too is elated by a turn of fortune born of violence, but she appears to harbor no residual sense of her own evil. Perhaps one difference is that she has paid for her bad acts in personal suffering, while he has not. And circumstances may not have completely robbed her of her conscience, whereas a twisted ideology has systematically removed Höss’s with only minor side-effects. He’s a lot creepier, of course. Society is presumed able to assess Eileen’s qualities against recognized standards and to manage them. It’s safe enough to call Eileen entertaining. Because that presumption does not apply to Höss – society having been intoxicated and co-opted – The Zone of Interest, as Glazer no doubt intends, is just too creepy to warrant that description.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, writer, and editor, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
