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This article was originally published on February 22, 2024.
Atthe 2024 Oscars,The Zone of Interestwon two awards, including Best International Feature.
But its not exactly anambiguousexperiment, is it?
If the rest ofZoneremains difficult to misread, its ending is flush with interpretive possibilities, an enigmatic ellipsis.
Suddenly, he is overcome with the urge to vomit on the stairs.
He retches because the ugly truth has, in the terrible quiet and darkness, found him.
If only for a moment, his sociopathic disassociation has faltered.
Discussing the film in arecent interview, Friedel seemed to reinforce that interpretation.
I think its a fight: body against his soul, the actor said of Hosss sudden sickness.
Because the body tells the truth and our mind, we can betray ourselves.
We are masters of self-deception.
Still, its worth mentioning that theres an alternative way to read the end ofthatmovie.
What if his remorse was as calculated as his gangster swagger?
Its not as though Glazer paints a clear portrait of moral culpability asserting itself.
For starters, the retching happensbeforethe vision, which complicates any clean-cut sense of cause and psychological effect.
Or did he just drink too much at the party?
Its notable that the movie ends in 1943, a full two years before Germany surrendered.
The real-life Hoss did not have an Oskar Schindler moment.
He kept serving Hitlers vision and was unrepentant until a few days before his execution.
Hoss, in other words, wasnt just following orders, the default defense of the average Nazi.
He was trying to follow them reallywell, to get a gold star.
Its hisvictimsthat people will come to Auschwitz to honor.
He is a man chiefly concerned with his professional reputation.
The irrelevance of that in historical hindsight is what turns his stomach.
Auschwitz is still a workplace.
The custodians we see calmly dust its surfaces are doing a job, just as Hoss was.
The ending is like a monstrous distortion of the workaholics nightmare.
His labor will not be celebrated.
His Employee of the Month certificate will come down.
Even as Glazer cuts away, he keeps that disturbing framework in place.
But the evil of the Holocaust isnt a strictly past-tense problem.
It plays out in new forms all the time, ignored and condoned as we speak.
Tomorrows sobering memorials are todays atrocities happening just over the garden wall.
