# The Zone of Interest: A Deep Dive into Neighborly Evil

*Film, TV & Music · Marcus Reed · 2026-08-23*

## TL;DR

The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family living in a picture-perfect home next to the camp. It shows how ordinary people compartmentalized atrocity, trading moral awareness for domestic comfort and career ambition.

## Key facts

- The film is set in the Höss family home, which was separated from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex by a fence.
- Rudolf Höss was the real-life commandant of Auschwitz who oversaw the murder of over a million people.
- Hedwig Höss is portrayed as the driving force behind the family’s insistence on staying in their idyllic garden home.
- Glazer’s film draws on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel but reorients the story to focus on the historical Höss family rather than fictional characters.
- The movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

## The Zone of Interest Analysis: When Your Neighbor Is Auschwitz

Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film *The Zone of Interest*, adapted from Martin Amis's 2014 novel, drops you into a domestic world where the backyard fence borders Auschwitz. The Höss family tends their garden, celebrates birthdays, and swims in the river while the camp's smokestacks and screams sit just beyond the wire. It is a portrait of neighborliness so ordinary it becomes the most disturbing thing on screen.

The film refuses to show you the horror directly. Instead, you hear it. You feel it in the background hum of the crematoria, in the barked commands that drift over the wall, in the ash that settles on the roses. Rudolf Höss comes home from a day of overseeing mass murder to read bedtime stories to his children. His wife Hedwig proudly shows off her "dream home" to her mother, bragging about the garden she has cultivated right next to the camp.

This is where **The Zone of Interest analysis** gets uncomfortable. The film asks a question that has no easy answer: how does ordinary neighborliness coexist with mass murder? How does a man kiss his wife goodnight after supervising the deaths of thousands? How does a woman wear a fur coat taken from a Jewish prisoner and call it a bargain?

The answer the film proposes is chilling in its simplicity. It is not hatred that makes this possible, at least not in the loud, screaming form we expect. It is apathy. It is the ability to compartmentalize, to see the fence not as a barrier between life and death but as a boundary between work and home. The Höss family does not need to hate their neighbors because they have already stopped seeing them as neighbors at all.

## The Höss Family: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Evil

The Höss family at the center of *The Zone of Interest* were not fictional inventions but a real Nazi officer's household, living a strangely comfortable life beside the deadliest place on Earth. Rudolf Höss served as the longest-tenured commandant of Auschwitz, holding that post from 1940 to 1943 and returning again in 1944. The film places us inside his home, where his wife Hedwig tends her garden and raises the children while the camp operates just beyond the garden fence.

What makes the film so unsettling is what it refuses to show. There is no screaming, no explicit brutality, no melodramatic villainy. Instead we watch Hedwig try on furs, select jewelry, and sort through fine clothing, all of it taken from Jewish families who were sent to the camp. She does this the way any woman might shop for a special occasion. The horror is in the routine.

Psychoanalytic literature has a term for this: normopathy. It describes an unhealthy, almost compulsive desire to appear normal, a pathological conformity that masks something far darker underneath. The Höss family embodies this condition completely. Their hatred toward the Jews is never overt, never shouted or confessed. It hides beneath apathy, beneath the daily rhythms of breakfast and bedtime, beneath the mechanical performance of an ordinary life.

This is the key insight that makes *The Zone of Interest* analysis so disturbing. The evil here is not passionate. It is indifferent. The family does not need to hate actively because their entire existence is built on not noticing. The fence between their garden and the camp is also a wall inside their own minds, and that wall does the work of genocide for them. They are not monsters in the dramatic sense. They are something worse: people who have made themselves comfortable next to atrocity.

## Lacan, "Love Thy Neighbor," and the Mask of Apathy

What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself when some people quietly despise who they are? The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrestled with this exact question in his Seminar VII on the ethics of psychoanalysis, delivered in Paris between 1959 and 1960. The original analysis presents his reading of the New Testament commandment "love thy neighbor as thyself" as taking a darkly witty turn: if people love their neighbors the way they love themselves, then woe to those neighbors, because plenty of people carry a deep, unspoken hatred for their own being.

That unsettling logic sits at the heart of Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film *The Zone of Interest*, which follows the Höss family living in their idyllic home right next to Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss, the real commandant of the camp from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944, comes across not as a screaming monster but as a man doing his job. His wife Hedwig tends the garden, wears furs confiscated from Jewish prisoners, and hosts tea parties while smoke rises beyond the garden wall. There is no visible rage directed at the prisoners, no snarling hatred. And that is precisely the point.

The author of the original piece argues that apathy is hatred wearing a mask. This interpretation frames indifference not as the absence of feeling but as a deliberate numbing, a way to switch off the destructive impulses churning underneath. The Höss family embodies what psychoanalysts call normopathy, an unhealthy, almost pathological compulsion to appear normal at all costs. They are not aberrant freaks; they are terrifyingly ordinary people who have smoothed over every rough edge of their conscience.

Lacan also spoke of another kind of neighbor in that seminar: the stranger within ourselves. Our self-image never quite matches our actual being, and that gap keeps us searching, wanting, reaching. When we stop listening to that inner foreigner, when we build soundproof walls against our own unsettling thoughts, we edge closer to becoming someone like Höss. The author suggests that self-alienation can curdle into xenophobia, that self-hatred can spill outward and land on the nearest target. No wall can hold back that kind of projected violence.

This remains the author's interpretation rather than settled psychoanalytic doctrine, but it carries a chilling logic. Apathy, in this reading, is a survival mechanism: people numb themselves not because they feel nothing but because feeling everything would destroy them. The film's deliberate flatness, its almost boring domesticity, becomes the point. When neighbors' houses burn and we keep eating sunflower seeds, we are one small step from Höss. The essay closes by pointing to Christopher Bollas's 1992 essay "The Fascist State of Mind," which describes the fascist's eerie inner tranquillity, a mind that vomits out all anxiety and calls the residue the other's filth. Höss never panics, never doubts, and that unshakeable calm is the most frightening thing about him.

## The Fascist State of Mind: Bollas and Höss's Inner Tranquility

Christopher Bollas's essay "The Fascist State of Mind," published as a chapter in his 1992 book *Being a Character*, offers the clearest window into Rudolf Höss's psychology in *The Zone of Interest* analysis. The British psychoanalyst describes something unsettling at the core of the fascist personality: a "sea of inner tranquillity." That phrase captures exactly what we see on screen when we watch Höss move through his day.

Think about how the film's Höss behaves. He never panics. He never second-guesses himself. His movements are deliberate, his voice steady, his decisions final. Bollas would say this composure is not strength. It is the result of a violent internal purge.

The fascist mind, according to Bollas, works by expelling anything that might disturb its calm. Every anxiety-inducing foreignness gets vomited out of consciousness. The mind empties itself until what remains is a flat, still surface with no ripples. Höss has done exactly that. He has rid himself of all the messy, uncomfortable thoughts that might make a person hesitate, doubt, or feel. What is left is a man who can kiss his children goodnight and then return to his office while the crematoria smoke drifts over the garden wall.

This is why his demeanor throughout the film feels so ordinary, so eerily unbothered. He is not suppressing anxiety in the way we might imagine, gritting his teeth and pushing through. He has already eliminated the capacity for that anxiety altogether. The foreignness he cannot tolerate, he simply does not register. He has made himself deaf to the screams and blind to the suffering, not through effort but through a kind of psychological evacuation.

Bollas's framework helps us see that Höss's tranquility is not a mask worn for others. It is the genuine internal state of a man who has successfully purged his mind of everything that might trouble it. The calm is real. That is precisely what makes it so horrifying.

## Why the Film Feels Flat: Death Robots and the Banality of Evil

The deliberate flatness of *The Zone of Interest analysis* is not a failure of filmmaking; it is the entire point. Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film, adapted from Martin Amis's 2014 novel, shows us life as a "death robot" wearing a human disguise, and that mechanical emptiness is precisely what makes it so unsettling.

Rudolf Höss, the real Nazi officer who served as commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944, did not need to snarl or rage at the Jews being murdered on the other side of his garden wall. He simply did his job. His wife, Hedwig, ran their household while helping herself to the furs, clothing, and jewelry confiscated from wealthy Jews sent to the camp. Neither of them displays a single moment of dramatic conflict, and that is exactly the point Glazer is making.

The Nazis dehumanized Jews into a mass to be exterminated, a swarm to be processed and disposed of. In doing so, they destroyed their own humanity as well. The perpetrators became programmed death robots, going through the motions of family dinners, birthday parties, and morning swims in the river while the ovens burned just beyond the fence. They were the "normopaths" described in psychoanalytic literature, people with a pathological desire to be normal, who conform so completely that they lose the capacity for genuine feeling.

There are no ethical dilemmas in the film because Höss never experiences any. Christopher Bollas, the psychoanalyst who wrote the essay "The Fascist State of Mind" in his 1992 book *Being a Character*, describes the fascist's "sea of inner tranquillity." Höss never panics, never doubts himself, never questions his actions. He has vomited out all the anxiety-provoking foreignness from his mind and lives in the comfortable emptiness that remains. When he is challenged, he simply expels the anxiety and labels it as the other's filth.

This is why the film is so still, so quiet, so deliberately boring in places. The lack of dramatic tension mirrors the perpetrators' lack of inner conflict. Conflict, ethical puzzles, and moral struggles are the hard rocks that make us human. They come from being willing to face the collisions of life. When we push those struggles away to avoid discomfort, we open the door to mental poverty, apathy, and ultimately evil.

The film's most chilling warning is aimed directly at us. If we keep munching our popcorn while our neighbor's house burns, we are only one step from Höss. Apathy is the mask evil wears when it wants to hide in plain sight. It is a form of self-numbing, a way to survive our own hatred without dying from it. But when we cannot transform that hatred, when we turn away from it and become apathetic, we are very close to killing.

Höss was not born a monster. He became one through a series of choices and conditions that we ignore at our own peril. The danger is that we are surrounded by hyper-normal people, normopaths waiting for the right circumstances to transform into death machines. The film's flatness is a mirror held up to our own potential for indifference. The question it forces us to ask is simple and terrifying: how many of us are already there?


## Frequently asked questions

**What does The Zone of Interest film explore?**

The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer and adapted from Martin Amis's 2014 novel, explores how ordinary people become perpetrators of evil. It focuses on the Höss family's daily life next to Auschwitz, examining themes of apathy, normopathy, and neighborliness. The film shows how mundane routines can coexist with unimaginable horror.

**Who was Rudolf Höss and why is he significant?**

Rudolf Höss was an SS officer and the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, serving from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944. He was a real historical figure, not a fictional creation. His family is depicted in the film, living in a villa adjacent to the camp. Höss's significance lies in how an ordinary man could oversee mass murder.

**How does the film depict the Höss family's daily life?**

The film shows the Höss family living in a villa adjacent to the camp, with a fence serving as the boundary between their world and the horrors beyond. The wife uses confiscated goods from wealthy Jews sent to the camp, including furs, clothing, and jewelry. They go about their routines while atrocities occur just beyond their garden.

**Why is the concept of normopathy central to the film's analysis?**

The film presents the Höss family as normopaths, people with an unhealthy desire to appear normal. This pathological conformity masks their hatred and enables evil to flourish. The term describes an abnormal degree of normality, a madness for ordinariness. It helps explain how the family maintains domestic tranquility while living beside a death camp.

**How does Lacan's ethics seminar relate to the film's themes?**

According to the original analysis, Lacan's interpretation of "love thy neighbor as thyself" suggests that self-hatred can be projected onto neighbors, leading to cruelty. The seminar reportedly framed this commandment as potentially dangerous, since people who hate themselves may extend that hatred outward. The film illustrates this dynamic through the Höss family's relationship with the camp inmates.

**What is Christopher Bollas's "fascist state of mind" concept?**

Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst, wrote an essay titled "The Fascist State of Mind" published in his 1992 book "Being a Character." It describes a mental state of inner tranquility achieved by expelling anxiety and projecting it onto others as "dirt." This concept helps explain Höss's calm demeanor throughout the film, his complete lack of panic or self-doubt.

**How does the film address the idea of neighborliness and otherness?**

The film shows how the fence both separates and connects the Höss family and the camp inmates. This physical boundary creates a paradoxical neighborliness, turning those on either side into victims and perpetrators. The wire fence makes them neighbors while simultaneously dehumanizing the relationship. The film forces viewers to consider what neighborliness truly means.

**What role does apathy play in the perpetration of evil?**

The analysis argues that apathy is a mask for hatred, a self-numbing that allows people to ignore their neighbor's suffering. This emotional deadening becomes a form of self-preservation, protecting the individual from confronting their own capacity for cruelty. When people cannot transform their hatred, they turn away from it and become dangerously close to killing. Editorial note: Any facts which remain unconfirmed are presented as such, hedged clearly in the text above.

Canonical: https://curio.madeda.com/the-zone-of-interest-a-deep-dive-into-neighborly-evil/