Desensitized & Oblivious: The Everyday Evils of The Zone of Interest

9/4/2026
By Josiah Rodriguez

          What is the first thing that comes to mind when considering evil? The term itself can evoke many associations and perspectives about what it denotes, but when we consider its essence, it is a commonly found facet. By putting the most blatant monstrosities on pedestals to despise, we ignore the bubbling eradication that festers within our everyday normality, neglecting the dark nature that constantly whirs within. We fall into flaws with nearly every aspect of our existence, and when living in a broken world with broken people, even the simplest actions we take can be deceptively destructive overall. With The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023), we are shown this truth within one of the darkest extremes, proving that evil is not just a mysterious or infamous threat in the distance, but the status quo of life itself.
                The Zone of Interest follows the commandant of Auschwitz and his family living next to this concentration camp, attempting to obtain a dream life of comfort and stature. On its own, the concept is already unsettling to imagine, but the movie’s approach is what takes it from a disturbing idea to an inescapable reality. Director Jonathan Glazer aimed to portray these real-life individuals not as cold-blooded monsters, but rather as everyday people, presenting the normality extracted from humanity’s common lives. Through its slice-of-life structure, sterile mise-en-scène, and disturbing uses of perspective, the film showcases how easily we become oblivious and desensitized to the filth we indulge in on a day-to-day basis. 

                 Avoiding a traditional story formula, The Zone of Interest is instead structured with naturalistic vignettes, basing its runtime on the interactions and tasks of the characters in order to sink the audience in their daily routines. Like a fly on the wall, we omnisciently observe these people as they live their lives, where there are no narrative twists or rising melodrama to be found. Here, it is only the Hösses themselves. This set template allows the monstrosities to helm an impact unlike any other, for by abandoning any stylistic filter, the day-to-day lives of a Nazi commandant and his family are a dark world to explore. As Rudolf Höss, the head of the household, plans with his peers on how to further the death toll at the camp, it’s never shown as antipathic evil, but simply a regular meeting on how to systematically improve. When his wife, Hedwig, gossips with her friends and boasts about clothes she had taken from a tortured prisoner, its casual deliveries and responses come across as just another conversation one might walk past. Even when the children of the Höss family happily run free, entertain curiosity, and maintain innocence like any regular child, they hardly focus on the darkness around them, considering it as only a mere fascination from time to time. Nothing is abominable, only normalized. With each Höss submerged in their ways of thinking, they live a narrow-minded existence, clouded with ignorance as the suffering of the Holocaust is just another backdrop for their functions. 

                 Furthering this desensitization comes with the cinematography that envelops the family, the result playing as though a portal into the past through the chosen forms of observance. On a technical level, the film used a ten-camera setup to construct complete coverage of each scene, capturing hour-long takes throughout the house as the family commenced their day. Through wide lenses and deep focus, every detail of the Hösses and the household is captured with pristine clarity, showing every movement, step, and word that they utter within an engulfed representation. It can be argued that this design resembles reality television through the hidden cameras that observe the lengthy motions and events that occur across the home, but rather than capturing bubbling drama or prizes that can drive the people within, it is merely just the commonalities of the family as they tend to their daily duties. If anything, watching The Zone of Interest is more along the lines of wild bird nests being livestreamed to YouTube, where cameras are positioned in natural habitats to capture the unbothered ruffles of unbothered creatures. Like these soulless animals that sit, yawn, and flap around at their basic accords, so do this family among the nest they home for themselves, with both beings merely minding their own, unbothered business. 
          Now, with most period pieces, their cinematic looks are often designed with majesty and texture, created like a regal portrait or a grainy photograph to showcase the past with a sense of otherworldly desire, nostalgia, or respect. Like strolling through a museum, these forms recollect on touches of the past, mimicking memories and trends with a stylized flair. The Zone of Interest abandons this form, and not just through its absorbing coverage. With the camera, the film neither adds nor takes away from the ominous events that occurred; rather, appearing efficient and plain to show the household as simply a harsh reality rather than a fabricated attraction. It creates a distilled, almost documentarian image to experience, all while the production design complements these choices through its commitment to keeping every artifact, costume, and location completely fresh and new. It’s a living and breathing reality, where by utilizing new materials to make 1943 Poland, there is no sense of romanticized recreation, keeping its past world from a fleeting distance. In this constant never-ending mundanity, the house is just a house. The people are just people. 
                 Even with this attempt at objectivity, the film’s choices at intent stylizations lie amid the Oscar-winning sound design, evolving the desensitization of the family through the haunting ambience. One of the first showcases is how the household perpetually clutters with sound, where every room bleeds into the next through the clicks and movements within, creating an overarching soundscape that is present and living. However, this key component is only just the surface through how the sound operates overall, for with the film aimed at the Hösses, the movie makes the bold choice to never display the suffering prisoners of Auschwitz onscreen. As their continuous anguish is regarded without a second thought through the family’s perspective, the opportunity to watch or even sympathize with these struggling groups is relegated to merely offscreen noise. The closest glimpse is during a “heart-to-heart” between Rudolf and his son, where while the two bond as family, they escort concentration campers through a field of tall grass, the blades masking their suffering bodies in the process. Desensitized to their anguish, the Hösses see the members of Auschwitz as just another chunk to the atmosphere of their home, blurred into the background without a second thought. By never offering a look at these struggling individuals, The Zone of Interest hammers just how oblivious one can be. As people, our aspirations, livelihoods, and hobbies often blind us from any bigger pictures surrounding the world, where even the tiniest commitments can undermine human worth through decisions stemmed from a self-centered view. Through this film, we see this general trait pushed to its furthest low. And yet, we are still given two new perspectives from outside of this neglectful household. ​
                  One of the most visually striking components of The Zone of Interest is how it uses infrared light. Using military cameras, the film captures night-vision sequences of uncanny quality, repurposing a tool for detecting oncoming threats and reinventing it through a mix of deep focus and AI upscaling. With this camerawork, Glazer designs scattered segments of an unknown girl from outside the family and household, hiding apples for the prisoners of Auschwitz while immersed in this uncanny imagery. With the film’s centerpiece addressed on the Hösses, the decision to swap perspectives allows the infrared sequences to be a full departure from the family's unbound evil, showing this established world freed from the suffocation of the unsullied, banal cinematography. The infrared presents a detached movement, where the colorless scenes unveil the setting as a rotting wasteland when separated from the dehumanized activities of the Hösses. The immersion of their constant blindness is stripped away, with the world at its most maligned by no longer ignoring evil but radiating its essence through a full-blown apocalypse of the verisimilitude. 
          Does color ever showcase this unknown girl? Only with a bare exception, for with every moment she is outside in the engrossing blight, the film refers merely to the night-vision portraits that fill the locale. But Glazer gives us a parallel to the Hösses through this young girl. Once she reaches her own home, the colors swing back into motion. Just like the Hösses, we observe as she enters her home, greets her family, eats dinner, and even plays the piano. We are once again the fly on the wall, watching humanity's motions unfold onscreen. The behaviors are present here as they were in the Auschwitz-bound household, and while the Hösses live in unconcerned debauchery, both families exist in a shared mundanity. It points to the overwhelming assimilation of choices and actions that we share as a people, living the same lives as those around us through basic, mutual traits. With these decisions, Glazer portrays the broken nature of our species, furthering dread as we act, operate, and aspire alongside the Hösses and prisoners of Auschwitz, where compassion and cruelty are interwoven to form common life. 
               The Zone of Interest breaks down the premonition that there are levels to the darkness across our world, and how in reality, we are all on the same playing field of existence. In its sleek appearance, we are presented with a castration of history’s barriers that exposes the unrelenting, yet unconcerned beliefs humanity indulges in. Through the infrared sequences, we are given a disturbing comparison that shows how cyclical our ordinary living can be in our species. With the uncompromising sound design and camerawork, we exist among immorality without ever straying from our regular participations. The Zone of Interest shows that evil exists in each of us, operating in tandem with our species as we wander amid desensitized routines.