The official trailer for the World War II-era movie The Zone of Interest has been released by A24. The feature, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, centers around the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, and has been described as one of the most haunting films of the year.
The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss and his wife, Hedwig, as they “strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden” next to Auschwitz. As the Second World War nears its close, Hedwig becomes focused on self-preservation, while Rudolf becomes increasingly overwhelmed and stressed by his duties under the German regime.
The film is loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis. After determining he wanted to adapt the book into a big-screen feature, director and screenplay writer Jonathan Glazer began his research into the Höss family, and with the help of the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau was able to access archival records, as well as survivor and victim testimonies.
“I started reading about Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig and how they lived at Auschwitz, right on the corner of the plot, as it were,” Glazer said in a press briefing from A24. “It became about the wall for me on some level, really. The compartmentalization of their lives, and the horror that they lived next door.”
He added, “I didn’t want to feel like I was making a movie about this other period [of time] and putting it in a museum. We’re talking about arguably one of the worst periods of human history, but we can’t say ‘let’s put it away;’ or ‘it’s not us, we’re safe, it was eighty years ago.’ We can’t think that it doesn’t relate to us anymore. It clearly does, and, troublingly, it may always. So I wanted to be looking at it with modern eyes.”
Rudolf Höss was a German SS officer who served as the commandant of Auschwitz during WWII. In this role, he implemented the regime’s Final Solution and was the one to introduce Zyklon B for use in the gas chambers, after it was suggested by Deputy Commandant Karl Fritzsch.
Höss joined the SS in 1934, and over the next four years was stationed at Dachau, where he learned how to run a concentration camp. In 1941, he was ordered to establish a new camp next to Auschwitz, which ultimately became Birkenau – or Auschwitz II. After leaving Auschwitz in 1943, he returned for Operation Höss, in which 430,000 Jewish people from Hungary were sent there.
In total, Höss is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of over one million individuals over the course of the Holocaust.
While he tried to escape following the war under the false identity of Franz Lang, but was located in Gottrupel, Schleswig-Holstein in 1946 and arrested. The Supreme Court in Warsaw sentenced him to death for Crimes Against Humanity, and he was hanged at Auschwitz in April 1947.
The Zone of Interest stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller as Rudolf and Hedwig, respectively, as well as Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier, Lilli Falk and Medusa Knopf. The movie premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, where it won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize and received a six-minute standing ovation. It has since been selected as the British entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.
Both Hüller and Friedel took a while to sign on to the project, and they both understood how difficult it would be to portray these real-life figures. “It was a long process, with lots of questions involved, and lots of doubts too,” Hüller revealed.
This uneasiness also had to do with the fact that the film was shot at Auschwitz itself.
“I wanted to take a tour of the camp,” Friedel recalled. “I decided to do it before the shoot, to visit as a human being, as a normal person, as myself, and then as this character. When I was there, I felt like the character was in charge, had this power. It was a very bad feeling: ‘this is my castle, this is my work.’ It was strange to do this, but very important.”
The film has received acclaim since its premiere in May. Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman called it “chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope,” while Kevin Maher of The Times called it a “landmark movie, hugely important, that’s unafraid of difficult ideas.”
As of publishing, The Zone of Interest holds a rating of 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
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The Zone of Interest is slated for a limited release in US theaters on December 15, 2023. Polish audiences will be able to view it in theaters on February 9, 2024.