The Zone of Interest (2023)

The Zone of Interest does not confront us with graphic images of Auschwitz. Instead, it confronts us with the horror of normal life that exists alongside atrocity. The Höss family tends to their garden, hosts friends, plans vacations, and disciplines their children while screams, gunfire, and smoke seep over the wall. The film is quiet, slow, even boring, and that is its power. Evil here is not a spectacle. It is the background noise of a comfortable life, the sound of death muffled by walls and willful ignorance.

Theologically, this is a portrait of sin in one of its most insidious forms: the ability to partition our lives so that righteousness and wickedness can coexist without apparent conflict. The prophet Amos condemned those who reclined on ivory couches and sang songs while Joseph was in ruin, and Isaiah warned against those who build their houses with injustice. The Höss family embodies these warnings. They live as though paradise has been achieved, but it is a paradise rooted in the destruction of God’s image-bearers just beyond the hedges. Their “normalcy” is itself damnable, because it reveals a seared conscience that can no longer hear the cries of the oppressed.

The sequence near the end, in which Rudolf glimpses the Auschwitz of today preserved as a museum, is a theological thunderclap. It is as though time has broken open, and he is forced to reckon with what will remain of his life’s work. The house, the garden, the small ambitions of a family man will not endure. What endures is the memory of atrocity, and the fact that millions will walk through the ruins to bear witness. Here the film brushes against eschatology. God has promised that all hidden things will be brought to light, that every deed will be judged. Rudolf’s vision anticipates this unveiling. What he ignores in his time will become the defining legacy of his life.

For the Christian, the warning is sobering. It is easy to denounce the horrors of the Holocaust from a distance, but the film presses us to ask what ignored evils sustain our own comfort today. What walls do we build so that the cries of the exploited, the unborn, the persecuted, or the impoverished do not disturb our gardens? The Höss family is extreme, but their sin is a magnified version of a temptation common to all: to seek peace and stability for ourselves even if it requires blindness to injustice.

The cross of Christ speaks directly into this. On it, God exposed the world’s violence and hypocrisy by bearing it himself. The resurrection proclaims that evil cannot finally be hidden, nor will it have the last word. The Zone of Interest leaves us unsettled because it refuses to resolve the tension. That is appropriate. Until the final judgment, Christians are called to live with open eyes and open ears, refusing to build lives of comfort that depend on the suffering of others.