Everyone wanted to know when they would start filming the bad stuff. Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer had been sitting with Martin Amis’s loosely novelized story of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, for a decade, before the book that gives the film its name had even been published. He was going to make a film about the Holocaust, but you would never, ever see what happened there; instead, it would be about the Nazi family who lived on the other side of the wall. 

That’s “Film One”, as The Zone of Interest sound designer Johnnie Burn—one of Glazer’s closest collaborators across the past two decades—tells us of the unusual process of bringing one of history’s most documented tragedies to the screen in a different way. “Film Two” is the story that Glazer and Burn built through sound design of the death camp over the wall—not out of a need to be stylistically subversive for the sake of advancing the art form: this, at this moment in history, was the only option. 

In narrative fiction as much as creative nonfiction, in endless news reportage and now in the social media content captured by heroic citizens-turned-journalists in Ukraine, southern Israel, Gaza, Sudan and too many other places to bear, media in so many forms has visualized suffering and dying bodies to the point of near-total desensitization. These images seemingly expose us to tragedy, while in the process completely ignoring and othering the perpetrators. In the eerie mundanity of The Zone of Interest, we are forced to sit with the normality of it all. To watch the horrifying proximity and ease with which hundreds of thousands of lives can be destroyed while, a stone’s throw away, life goes on. 

The Zone of Interest takes a microscopic look at the Höss family as they build their dream life for the next generation with their lovely house and nice big garden. The only visual suggestion of anything to potentially worry about (for us, not them) is the billowing smoke from the chimneys of the camp. They sometimes use the ashes as plant fertilizer. But the horrors are all there in the film’s sound design—an inescapable, thunderous maelstrom of pain and terror, implying every form of suffering inflicted on more than one million Jewish people between 1940 and 1945 under the Nazi regime. 

“We had the responsibility of respectfully and responsibly providing the sound of mass murder and doing it in a way that isn’t sensationalized,” Burn explains. “Jonathan had made the clear decision that we would never see any of the atrocity—so for me, it was a year of making the film you see, Film One, and another six months of putting the sounds of the camp onto it.” It’s worth noting that a total lack of filmed atrocities includes the film’s harrowing ending, in which Höss vomits intensely. You hear it; you see him convulse, but no bile is ever shown. 

“I was living with ghosts,” says McQueen of the project, an accidental collaboration with his life partner, the author and filmmaker Stigter, with whom he shares a home and family in Amsterdam. “I thought I’d get this old footage from the ’40s and shoot the exact same frame in present day, so I’d project one on top of the other. It was never the plan to collaborate, but Bianca was writing the lyrics; I was writing the music. We made a movie about things which are on our doorstep, underneath our beds. Sometimes it’s the things which are right underneath your nose which need the attention—I’m very proud that one can make something about something which is immediate.” 

There is a sense of calm in the film. McQueen captures a city doing its best to keep the lights on during the pandemic, while actor Melanie Hyams reads Stigter’s words with as much vim as found in a phone book—intentionally. “The facts speak for themselves, and the reaction is for the reviewer,” Stigter points out. 

Monotony and mundanity define both pieces of work and all the events that allowed them to exist, and for audiences used to big-screen fireworks, the approach has the desired, reflective effect. “What we view as atrocious, violent and inhumane was once the mundane. It’s easy for us to forget how much blood was spilled, as it has soaked into the soil and grown into trees,” Letterboxd member Ashley writes of Occupied City. And here’s Jess on The Zone of Interest: “Even flowers grow in blood-soaked soil.” (A stark comment about the moment when Höss spits at his disciples that the lilac bushes must not be ruined—they were planted to decorate the camp.)

Beyond the year of research into indescribable acts of genocide that informed his work on the concentration camp, Burn was also concerned with the day-to-day of the Höss family. The Zone of Interest is, formally, a meticulous, controlled, impressively detailed film. The sound designer describes the mechanics of a “network of hidden microphones”, a total of 40, populating every room in the house. “Normally, the primary role of the guy who records the sound on set is to get the dialogue. But here, what they’re actually saying is less important. It’s about experiencing people in a house, how they move around and their daily routines; the footsteps and the teacup rattles. Whilst the actors did wear the normal lapel mic, that was always the backup: before every scene was shot, the directional hidden mics would be repositioned—most of them are on the ceiling, and we had a nice healthy VFX budget to remove them afterwards.”

The level of precision, for me at least, speaks to the important distinction between mundanity and the idea of “the banality of evil”. The latter, a catch-all to point to the lack of any distinguishable care or empathy for another human life, can imply an inevitability—or, as Kailey writes on Letterboxd, a ivity. “This wide, nebulous concept of ‘banal evil’ seems to have evolved to be evil as a ive force rather than an active one, a power we go along with rather than choose, almost a cop-out in certain scenarios if you will.” She continues: 

“Why do you believe what you believe? when you get up and walk the dog, drive to work, donate, post on twitter, prune your garden, talk to your friends, buy a coat, raise your children, what is the future you are working towards? who are your choices affecting? who are they helping? who are they harming? is it banal, your everyday life? does it seem ive? i promise you it is not. i promise you that it never is.” 

Indeed, Ben Kaye on Letterboxd calls Occupied City “maybe one of the most hopeful pieces of Jewish art out there.” Ryan K finds something to hold on to in the bare minimum we can all do, too: “McQueen takes you on a wanderers’ tour of a city and her people who find themselves… well, occupied and occupying. Just surviving.” What’s observed as flat and endless might be the most tangible lifeline there is—because the violent alternative is always staring us right in the face. As Anahit writes: “What this says about the lifeblood of cities, how they breathe and die, their palimpsests of memory and violence and the fucking inevitability of repetition, is so extraordinary.” 

McQueen and Stigter acknowledge that much of what is said in Occupied City is entirely up for the audience to feel in whichever way they see fit. Of her narrator, who many have dismissed as somewhat lacking in emotion, Stigter says: “She’s not knowing the story, she’s finding it out almost as she speaks. She’s reading it for the first time. It’s much more powerful than if a voice is sitting between the facts, telling you what to think, or making it sentimental or judgmental.” 

Occupied City, McQueen adds, is told in this deliberate way to move beyond the often forced storytelling of other films confronting these past horrors. “It’s not just about Jewish people, too, it’s about everybody. Any individual who is interested in the world. It’s on all of us. It concerns us all, how we all enter the world through this particular point in history, and others. You need to find your own path into it, how you get into it, or how you solve it or embrace it. How you become bigger than it. Because otherwise, it becomes bigger than you.”

McQueen is well aware that many people might be wary of his film due to the runtime. (I worry, conversely, about the spare accomplishment of Zone as the thing to shock people, after they have merrily made the decision to watch this particular Holocaust narrative from the man who made Sexy Beast, rather than the many hundreds of fictional Holocaust narratives. I think my dad would be too upset to finish it.)

Although I firmly endorse cinema viewings of Occupied City, it took me three sittings to finish the documentary, which, I think, allowed for a greater experience. I was able to appreciate and absorb all the pieces of the jigsaw even better. The Zone of Interest, too, in its starkly efficiant runtime, reveals more with each watch. There are details in the work that outlive the evil that darkened everything.

Both McQueen’s and Glazer’s films premiered at Cannes last year, with McQueen introducing the first screening of his somewhat lightheartedly, knowing the commitment folks had made to carve out half a day in the festival grind. “I’m very grateful that this movie is now away from festivals, people scurrying around and having to see four films in a day,” he says. “Someone said there’s something about watching this film with time that makes for a different experience to being in a rat race.

“What is being projected on screen, I want it to be reflected. And the only thing we can reflect, if we’re projecting a film, is an audience in the cinema. I’m asking a lot. In that time, I want to give a lot.”