Road to the Oscars Review: ‘Zone of Interest’ is an Experiment In the Casually Horrific

Every year, in the time between when the Oscar nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for best picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot of the movies are now on streaming.

So far, she hasn’t made it through all of the nominees since the category expanded from five nominees to as many as 10, but this year, she intends to pull it off and write reviews of each movie as she goes through them. She already saw and reviewed American Fiction as part of the Denver Film Festival, and she already saw Barbie and it was reviewed by fellow OFM writer Ivy Owens. OFM writer Owen Swallow also already reviewed Poor Things. That leaves seven movies for her to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!

98/100

I’ve often said that I long for the year when none of the Best Picture nominees take place during one of the World Wars, especially World War II. At this point, there have been so many films on the topic of World War II, and particularly the Holocaust, that mining the greatest tragedy in human history again and again starts to feel like war propaganda at best and the exploitation of human misery at its worst.

But, if we must revisit that wretched war yet again for this awards season, at least it’s being done in as bold and powerful of a film as Polish film Zone of Interest by director Jonathan Glazer. But, make no mistake, this is a brutally difficult film to watch. I hope that this proves to be the most disturbing of the Best Picture nominated films because, if there’s a movie more disturbing than Zone of Interest, I frankly have no interest in seeing it.

The film follows a Nazi commandant named Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) and their family of five children who have built an idyllic home directly next to the Auschwitz concentration camp which Höss operates, with their property literally sharing a wall with the camp. Rudolph and Hedwig spend the movie going about their day-to-day domestic lives as they ignore the screams of dying people on the other side of the wall like the most horrific atrocity ever committed by humans isn’t happening 10 feet away.

That’s pretty much what the whole movie is. There are minor plots to the story such as Rudolf trying to get out of a transfer to another camp and Hedwig’s mother coming to visit, but at no point does a larger drama unfold. It’s about petty domestic problems as they proceed for a family that is ignoring untold human misery on the other side of that wall. And yes, you can absolutely hear the screams of dying people throughout the whole movie. It’s unsettling to listen to, but what is even more unsettling is how little the Höss family reacts to what is going on around them.

In that sense, this movie is less of a traditional narrative since so little actually happens narratively, and it becomes more of an experiment in the casually horrific. At no point do any of those on the other side of the wall become visible to either the audience or the Höss family. It’s human tragedy as background noise, and that’s utterly unsettling. But the movie invites you to examine your own life and see, in what ways, you are not unlike the Hösses, the ways in which you ignore human suffering and go on benefitting from it. At a time when a genocide is occurring in Gaza, this is an important lesson in empathy for everyone.

Zone of Interest is up for five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jonathan Glazer, Best International Feature, and Best Sound. Most likely the only award it will walk away with is Best International Feature Film—which is a pretty safe bet when it’s the only film nominated in that category and Best Picture at the same time—and might upset for Best Sound over Vegas-odds-favorite Oppenheimer. The Vegas odds for everything else have Zone of Interest as having a pretty distant chance at best.

So while there’s probably no scenario in which Zone of Interest is going to upset Oppenheimer for Best Picture, there’s no question that it’s likely the most challenging film nominated in the Best Picture category. It’s not a film that anybody would want to watch twice, but it’s a film that almost everybody needs to see once.

Zone of Interest is playing in theaters and coming soon to AppleTV. Check the A24 website for showtimes and pre-order information.

Photo courtesy of A24.