When The Zone of Interest (2023), a portrait of the domestic life of the Nazi Commandant of Auschwitz, won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, director Jonathan Glazer opted not to give the usual acceptance speech. Instead, flanked by producers James Wilson and Len Blavatnik, he read a statement linking the film with the war that had raged in Gaza since the attack on Israel launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023. It ran, in part:

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization — how do we resist? Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. (The 96th Academy Awards)

Predictably, given the strong feelings around October 7th and its aftermath, controversy ensued. Glazer’s comments — deceptively quoted by several media outlets to create the impression that he and his team had renounced their Jewishness rather than denounced the way they felt it had been appropriated to justify Israel’s policies toward Gaza — were condemned by the President of the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA and by hundreds of Jewish creatives and executives in Hollywood who signed an open letter responding to his speech. In turn, his remarks were defended by the Director of the Auschwitz Memorial and by dozens more Jewish artists in Hollywood who published an open letter of their own. Lost in the furor over the statement was something significant — and perhaps surprising — it revealed about Glazer’s view of his film: first, that it is about the dehumanization that can occur any time we refuse to recognize ourselves in others; and, moreover, that it advocates for a resistance to this dehumanization in the form of empathy — the kind embodied by Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a Polish woman who as a teenager risked death to secretly aid prisoners at Auschwitz.

If this revelation is surprising, it may be because it doesn’t fit the image that many viewers have of Glazer. As the director of cerebral arthouse movies as well as stylish, conceptually daring music videos and commercials, he has developed a reputation as a rather dispassionate filmmaker: an artist more interested in form and ideas than emotion. And empathy, at least in cinema, is frequently linked with emotion and explored or evoked in sentimental, even melodramatic terms. There is, however, nothing inherently emotional about empathy. The word “empathy” was inspired by the German term Einfühlung (“in-feeling”), which was coined in the late nineteenth century to describe the physical response to a work of art — the act of “feeling into” an art object. “Empathy” was proposed as an English translation of Einfühlung in 1908 by the psychologist E.B. Titchener, who derived it from the Greek empatheia, meaning “passion” or “physical affection.” Through the 1920s, as Susan Lanzoni has shown, it was used almost exclusively to signify a kinesthetic experience: a projection of the self into poetry, painting, sculpture, or dance. Not until after World War II did the meaning of the word shift — thanks to its appropriation by researchers in the social and behavioral sciences — to denote the attempt to understand other people on their own terms. Even then, Lanzoni writes, empathy was typically understood as “a balanced, cognitive appraisal of others” rather than an “immersion in another’s feelings” (194). The notion that empathy is or should be rooted in emotion — imagining how another must feel and mirroring those feelings — was largely promulgated in mass media and popular culture in the decades that followed, and has been viewed with skepticism, even alarm, by psychologists, philosophers, artists, and others. In Against Empathy, Paul Bloom argues that, understood as the act of feeling what one believes other people feel, empathy often leads not to moral, kind, or compassionate behavior, but precisely the opposite. He suggests that emotional empathy is like a spotlight narrowly “focusing on certain people in the here and now” (9). It can be blind to the “suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with . . . pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism;” it is “innumerate, favoring the one over the many;” it can even spark violence, as “our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others” (9). Bloom calls instead for a “rational compassion” — a more distanced and diffuse concern for the well-being of others rooted in reason rather than emotion. I would suggest that it is this type of empathy that courses through The Zone of Interest, a film that coolly dissects how a man passionately devoted to his own family could oversee the murder of thousands of others.

As a matter of fact, I would argue that such empathy runs through Glazer’s whole body of work. Indeed, it’s difficult for me to think of a contemporary filmmaker more committed to exploring this kind of empathy and its absence. Glazer has made just four feature films to date, but with the possible exception of his 2000 debut Sexy Beast — a surreal, profane heist film that he directed but didn’t write — they have consistently foregrounded the importance of recognizing ourselves in others. His work captures the transformational power of that moment of identification and the terrible consequences that can follow when it fails to occur. This is especially apparent in The Zone of Interest and Glazer’s preceding film, Under the Skin (2013). Although they were released a decade apart, they can be seen as companion pieces — or, more precisely, as mirror images of one another — in their treatment of empathy. Under the Skin concerns an alien disguised as a human woman who is tasked with harvesting the flesh of men and runs afoul of her overseers when she begins to empathize with her prey. The Zone of Interest focuses on Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, and his family, whose idyllic life in a home next to the camp is predicated on a refusal to recognize the humanity of the prisoners on the other side of the wall. In essence, the former is about a monster who becomes human through her embrace of empathy, while the latter is about human beings who have become monstrous in their rejection of it. Fittingly, both are adaptations — the result of a process rooted in film’s engagement with an other: the medium of literature. Under the Skin is based on a 2000 novel of the same title by Michel Faber, while The Zone of Interest is based on a 2014 novel of the same title by Martin Amis. In each case, Glazer made significant changes to the story, the characters, and (most crucially) the point of view of his source text. In my view, however, these changes serve to clarify the central message of both novels: that a precondition of our humanity is our recognition of it in others. This essay is an exploration of the ways in which both adaptations not only practice a rationally compassionate empathy in their depiction of human suffering, but also advocate for it as a form of resistance to the dehumanization so often at the root of such suffering, past and present.

Much has been written about Glazer’s Under the Skin in the decade or so since its release, but few pieces on the film consider its relationship with its source text; many neglect to mention that it’s an adaptation at all. This is unfortunate, since a comparison of the two helps bring into sharper focus a film that has been described as “opaque” (Suppia and Mazierska 290), with a narrative that “frustrates rather than offers intelligibility or character motivation” (Hilderbrand). Faber’s novel follows the story of Isserley, an alien recruited by a powerful interplanetary corporation to work as part of its operations on Earth. Surgically altered to appear more human, she cruises the motorways of the Scottish Highlands in a battered Toyota Corolla, picking up male hitchhikers whom she anesthetizes and delivers to the farm that she and her associates use as a home base. There, her victims are penned, fattened, and slaughtered like livestock before being packaged and shipped to her home world, where human flesh is considered a delicacy by the elite. Initially, Isserley is thankful for her job, which has enabled her to avoid the hellish fate of laboring underground on her ruined planet to generate the oxygen its atmosphere no longer provides. She revels in the comparatively unspoiled beauty of the Earth, while regarding the men she procures, with bemused contempt, as little more than dumb animals. As the novel progresses, however, her attitude changes. In constant pain from her disfiguring surgery and terrified that she’ll be replaced if she fails to keep pace with the demand for human victims, Isserley comes to resent her work. Then, following a visit from the son of the corporation’s founder and CEO, a reformer who abhors the cruelty of his father’s trade, she begins to pity, even identify with, her human victims. In the end, she flees the farm, hoping to start a new life on her own, only to be fatally injured in an automobile accident. Her final act is to set off a bomb in her car designed to prevent its (and her) discovery by the authorities — a fate she embraces with something like relief, imagining that she will become one with the world around her.

Faber’s novel can be (and has been) read from an eco-critical perspective as a commentary on factory farming and animal rights, or from a Marxist perspective as a satire of labor exploitation and consumer culture under neoliberalism, but as even this short synopsis makes clear, it turns on the notion that an engagement with otherness can be transformative. The crux of the story is Isserley’s movement from indifference toward humans to empathy for them. In the book, Faber drives this home through his handling of point of view. Narrating from a third-person limited omniscient perspective, he puts readers in her head, enabling us to track her conception of self and other as it evolves. Early in the novel, it’s rigidly binary and hierarchal. Ironically, she thinks of herself and her fellow extraterrestrials as human beings, while considering the men she abducts (whom she and her kind call “vodsels” — a play on the Dutch word for food) as subhuman beasts: alien creatures without real intelligence, feeling, or individuality. She empathizes more with the sheep on her farm, which vaguely resemble members of her own species. When Amlis Vess, the rebellious corporate scion who drops in for a visit, suggests that vodsels have a claim to personhood, she scoffs:

The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions. In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. (Faber 186)

Isserley prides herself on her purely anatomical interest in her prey, on her clinical detachment: she sizes them up with a butcher’s eye. (In the opening pages of the novel, Faber leads us to believe that she’s cruising hitchhikers for casual sex before revealing that intimacy, however fleeting, is the last thing on her mind.) And yet she’s already experienced the nagging suspicion that they might not be so different from her under the skin:

Of course she knew that these creatures were all exactly the same fundamentally. A few weeks of intensive farming and standardized feeds made that clear enough. But when they wore clothes, styled their hair into odd patterns, and ate strange things to distort themselves into unnatural shapes, they could look quite individual — so much so that you sometimes felt, as with human beings, that you’d seen a particular one somewhere before. (145)

Forced to live like a vodsel — to dress and behave like them, to speak their language, to have her body modified to resemble theirs — she worries as time goes on that she’s been “brought so close to an animal state physically, that she [is] losing her hold on humanity and actually identifying with animals” (184).

The reader is likely ahead of Isserley here: we’re primed to resist her dehumanization of her victims and identify with their suffering. To ensure our empathy, though, Faber again employs point of view in a crucially important way. He toggles between Isserley’s perspective and those of the male hitchhikers she picks up, granting both self and other subjectivity, and framing each encounter as a meeting of equals — albeit mutually uncomprehending equals. These men are not all sympathetic; they run the gamut from a shy German tourist to a serial rapist. They are, however, all indisputably people, endowed with intelligence, feeling, and individuality. As such, they elicit our empathy, and, ultimately, Isserley’s. The turning point for her character comes late in the novel, when she picks up a hitchhiker whose outlook on life matches hers almost exactly: he’s lonely, bitter, and misanthropic. She’s never met anyone like him and finds herself “wonder[ing], alarmingly, if she like[s] him” (280). She claims him as a victim, but reluctantly, apologetically; later, she contemplates helping him escape from the farm, even though she knows it’s too late. He’s already been readied for the pen, his testicles removed, teeth cored, and tongue docked. But instead of burning all of his clothing, as she typically does following an abduction, she saves his pullover and begins wearing it, finding comfort in its fit. She locates the van he’s been living in and frees his dog, which had been locked inside. And rather than returning to the farm afterward, she leaves it behind, resolved to make her own way in the world. Tragically, her time as a free agent is short-lived. Operating from a newfound sense of empathy, she gives a ride to a man desperate to reach his pregnant girlfriend, only to lose control of her car on the way. Her passenger is ejected in the crash, and she is trapped in the wreckage, gravely hurt. As she triggers the explosives that will obliterate her and the vehicle, though, she finds hope in the notion that death will mean a complete erasure of the boundary between self and other — that the “atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air” and her “invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun” (310).

Glazer’s adaptation of Under the Skin — when it’s recognized as an adaptation — is typically described as an extremely loose translation of Faber’s novel, one that retains very little of its source text. In fact, the broad strokes of the story remain the same. Even finer details like Isserley’s difficulty digesting human food, her visits to a rocky beach and the ruins of a medieval abbey, and her sexual assault at the hands of a man clad in reflective workwear are preserved. Most importantly, the focus of the film remains the protagonist’s journey from indifference to empathy where otherness is concerned. It tells the story of a nameless alien who, wearing the skin of a human woman (Scarlett Johansson), is tasked with procuring men for her species’ needs. Working under the supervision of a sinister motorcyclist (Jeremy McWilliams) who is presumably also an alien under the skin, she trolls the streets of Glasgow in a white cargo van, luring male pedestrians to derelict homes and buildings with the promise of sex. Inside each of these locations is an indeterminate, seemingly impossible space — a black void where the men sink into the floor as they attempt to follow the protagonist, who strips as she crosses the room. Once under its surface, floating in a strange substance that seems both solid and liquid, their skin is gradually loosened, then stripped from them as their bodies are deliquesced and siphoned off for some unknown purpose. The protagonist, meanwhile, serenely redresses and goes on the hunt again. The turning point for her character occurs when she encounters a man with a facial deformity caused by neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson). She entraps him like the others, but then, in a spontaneous show of empathy, frees him and goes on the run, driving her van into the Highlands until it runs out of gas. She’s taken in by a quiet man (Michael Moreland) with whom she stays for a few days, experiencing several facets of human life for the first time: music, television, even an abortive attempt at sex. After leaving him, she hikes into a national park where she has the misfortune of encountering a commercial logger (Dave Acton) who attempts to rape her. In the struggle, her skin is torn, revealing the alien underneath. Appalled, the logger douses her with gasoline and sets her on fire. In the film’s final moments, we watch as the smoke rising from her charred remains mingles with snow falling from the sky.

Glazer’s movie differs from Faber’s novel not in its treatment of story, plot, or character, primarily, but in its narration. Whereas the original grants us access to Isserley’s thoughts and feelings, the adaptation maintains a rigorously objective point of view, making its protagonist’s outlook, motivations, and development more difficult to decipher, and its theme less obvious as a consequence. For some critics, this is a failing of the film. Alfredo Suppia and Ewa Mazierska, who describe it as “opaque and often devoid of any voice” (290), write that while “Faber’s book deals with important aspects of neoliberalism, most importantly exploitation of the working class by remote elites . . . this aspect is omitted from the film, which can be read as a sign of unwillingness of popular arthouse cinema to engage with the problem of social inequality” (295). Their critique, however, misses the other ways in which Glazer communicates the novel’s central themes — especially its insistence on the transformative power of empathy. Rather than using literary techniques like omniscient narration, he employs a variety of cinematic devices to track the protagonist’s gradual embrace of what Colin Heber-Percy calls “the risk-laden stance of empathetic openness to the world“ (351), [of] being always in the middle, sharing, between things, seeing and being seen, knowing and being known” (350).

In the first half of the film, for example, the protagonist is associated with spaces that visually signal her purely exploitative interest in humanity and her indifference to the suffering of others — even her own kind. We first meet her in a blindingly white room, standing over the body of a young woman (Lynsey Taylor Mackay) that her male handler, the motorcyclist, has retrieved from a roadside ditch. The woman’s possession of the cargo van that the protagonist will use to stalk her prey suggests that she is the protagonist’s predecessor: an alien in human skin also tasked with harvesting male flesh who has met an untimely end, perhaps at the hands of one of her intended victims. The protagonist, who is nude, coolly strips the woman and dons her clothing. She shows not the slightest compunction doing so and in fact demonstrates more interest in an ant she finds crawling on the woman’s body than she does in the woman. (Curiously, the dead woman sheds a single tear after being undressed — another clue that she is the protagonist’s predecessor, since the protagonist’s skin also seems to retain life, even sentience, when it is removed at the film’s conclusion.)  As the scene plays out, both characters are strongly backlit, appearing as silhouettes against the room’s glowing white walls, floor, and ceiling. The visual aesthetic of this scene is inverted in later scenes depicting the protagonist’s entrapment of the men she lures to the void-like space she accesses through derelict homes and buildings. Here, the walls and floor are a glassy black, in striking contrast to the pale white bodies of the protagonist and her male victims. Although Lucas Hilderbrand speculates in a thought-provoking essay on the film that these black and white spaces may be in service of a racialized metaphor linking Blackness with alienness, my view is that they quite literally evoke the protagonist’s binary conception of the world at the beginning of the movie. Like her fellow aliens, she sees things in black and white: self/other, alien/human, predator/prey. This kind of binary thinking forestalls a recognition of the self in the other, leaving little room for empathy or understanding. However, the sterile, featureless design of these environments — as well as their distorted acoustics and the keening strings and pulsing beats of Mica Levi’s score — frames such thinking as abstract and reductive, more ritualistic than realistic. It’s belied by the messy complexity of everyday life.

We’re reminded of those messy complexities every time the protagonist ventures into the outside world, which Glazer captures in a very different way. The scenes in which she stalks her prey involve unscripted interactions on the streets of Glasgow between Johansson and unsuspecting non-actors who were recorded with hidden cameras and microphones, giving these episodes an almost documentary-like feel. Hilderbrand writes that the film’s abrupt transitions between formalist and realist modes of mise-en-scène early in the movie create “a jarring cognitive dissonance that may resemble the alien’s own disorientation.” It’s interesting to note, then, that as the film goes on, the realist mode begins to predominate, suggesting that the protagonist’s initial bewilderment at life on Earth is giving way to a fascination with it.  By the second half of the movie, she has completely abandoned the abstract spaces associated with her detachment from humanity in favor of real-world spaces that enable her engagement with people. Levi’s score tracks this development, shifting from the eerie strings and staccato beats described earlier to sustained, gently modulating synthesizer chords. Replacing the omniscient narration in Faber’s novel, these cinematic devices reflect the protagonist’s gradual recognition of herself in others, capturing the transformational impact of empathy.

Glazer deploys other cinematic devices to highlight the protagonist’s gradual embrace of empathy as well. Chief among them is his handling of her gaze. He signals an interest in her perception of the world throughout his film, which opens with a prologue focusing on the assembly of her human eye and thereafter repeatedly presents her in the act of looking at others. Early in the movie, her gaze is pitiless — sizing up potential victims as she drives by in her van, flirtatiously encouraging the men whom she picks up, and going dead when a pedestrian rejects her advances. She looks at others as others: as things, objects, commodities defined solely by their use value. Again, however, there is a shift as the film progresses. She begins to look at the people she meets with curiosity, even recognition, seeing something of herself in them. At one point, when she’s idling at a stoplight, an immigrant selling roses on the road delivers a flower that another driver has purchased for her. She accepts it, only to find blood on her palm: the flower’s cellophane wrapping is smeared with it. She looks at the flower vendor, who is now bandaging his hand, which has been cut by the thorns of the roses he’s selling. She thoughtfully turns her gaze back to the blood on her palm, perhaps considering the similarities between herself and him: both migrants with limited options, both engaged in bloody work. A bit later, she trips on the sidewalk and is helped to her feet by several passersby. Afterward, she gazes at the people on the street, really noticing for the first time their individuality, their variety. Her views of them begin to accumulate on the screen — superimposed, moving, taking on a golden hue — until finally she appears at the center of this swirling, kaleidoscopic image, becoming part of what she sees. As Ara Osterweil notes, Glazer is engaged here in “denaturaliz[ing] customary ways of seeing identity,” (50) in posing questions such as: “How does perception make and remake identity? What is the difference between looking with and without feeling? How does an understanding of the world and a human’s place in it change when an ability to empathize with others develops?” (44). For his protagonist, seeing differently is the key to empathy. As the bearer of the look, she finds herself in others, becoming human. (Notably, once the protagonist starts looking with empathy, she stops speaking; it’s as if language, which we hear her practicing in the film’s prologue, is for her solely an instrument of manipulation, whereas the gaze is a medium of exchange.)

Of course, the protagonist is not only the bearer of the look in Glazer’s film; she is also subject to the gaze of others, many of whom seek to objectify or exploit her. Significantly, however, she succeeds in turning this look against itself, evading it, and ultimately reclaiming her image from those who wish to control it. While she is the object of the desiring gaze of the men she picks up in the movie, she effectively weaponizes what Laura Mulvey famously termed female “to-be-looked-at-ness,” using it to entrap them. And although she is initially subjected to the constant surveillance of her motorcycle-riding handler — who in one scene studies her at length from every angle, apparently to ensure that she still passes as human — she is able to slip his grasp. In escaping her overseer, the protagonist takes back not only her agency but also her image, which comes to fascinate her. Early on, her relationship with it is limited to a few perfunctory glances in her van’s rearview mirror as she’s driving or reapplying her lipstick. She sees her human skin the way her handler does: as a practical necessity — camouflage, a disguise, nothing more. But she gradually begins to identify with her reflection, to see herself in it; as she does, her empathy for others grows. Her decision to free the man with neurofibromatosis and go on the run is triggered by a lengthy, searching look in a mirror hanging in the abandoned tenement to which she has lured him. Later, not long before her attempt at intimacy with the quiet man, she curiously examines her nude body in a full-length bedroom mirror, turning this way and that in the crimson glow of a nearby space heater. Most memorably, after her skin is torn in the logger’s assault at the end of the film, she peels away her human face and turns it toward her. Somehow still alive, it stares back, blinking. At this instant, the protagonist is both alien and human, self and other, viewer and viewed. As Heber-Percy puts it, she “recognizes herself in the world, in the middle of things; she recognizes herself as a subject among subjects” (361). Functioning in place of Faber’s narration, her gaze in the closing moments of Glazer’s movie offers a “hymn to humanity” (361) in its silent testimony to the power of empathy.

As in the source text, the protagonist’s newfound openness to the world offers no protection from its dangers. Indeed, as Osterweil points out, when the protagonist “begins to relinquish her emotional detachment and empathize with others, she renders herself vulnerable to the injuries of the world” (47). This is made clear at the end of the film. While the protagonist’s immolation at the hands of the logger is horrific, however, its aftermath — the silent intermingling of smoke and snow, black and white, in the film’s final shots — echoes the transcendent fusion of self and other that Isserley experiences at the end of the book. In both cases, the message is that, as risky as empathetic openness can be, it’s preferable to a monstrous indifference to the personhood of others. And Glazer goes a step further. By moving the protagonist’s sexual assault (which occurs midway through the novel) to the end of the film and having it culminate in her murder, he underscores that empathy for the other is a function of perspective, not a matter of who you are or where you’re from. His alien ultimately develops a humanity that members of our species, including her xenophobic killer, are shown to lack.

If Glazer’s Under the Skin offers a parable about a monster who becomes human through her embrace of empathy, his adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest provides just the opposite: the tale of human beings who have become monstrous in their refusal to recognize the humanity of others. Amis’s novel revolves around several characters whose lives intersect in the “Zone of Interest,” a euphemism coined by the Nazi high command during World War II to describe the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Paul Doll is a fictionalized version of Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. He and his wife, Hannah, live with their two daughters in a home just outside the camp. Angelus “Golo” Thomsen is a womanizing SS officer stationed at Auschwitz who becomes infatuated with Hannah and determined to seduce her. Szmul Zachariasz is a Polish Jew who works as a Sonderkommando at the camp, assisting with the selection and extermination of new arrivals, and who is pressed into service by Doll as an instrument of revenge when the Commandant discovers that a relationship has developed between Thomsen and his wife.

The bulk of the story takes place between 1942 and 1943, when the genocide perpetrated at Auschwitz has reached an industrial scale and the tide of the war is beginning to turn against Germany. It opens with Thomsen’s first glimpse of Hannah, which sets the plot into motion. Initially, his interest in her is purely carnal; however, he becomes intrigued by her obvious disdain for her husband and her (more veiled) discomfort with the unhinged racial ideology that drives the camp, both of which he shares. For her part, Hannah is drawn to Thomsen’s cynicism and sanity — qualities sorely lacking in her husband, a venal, vindictive narcissist teetering on the edge of madness. Although their relationship remains platonic, they form an alliance of sorts: Thomsen pledges to investigate the whereabouts of Hannah’s former lover, an imprisoned German Communist whom Doll uses as leverage to control her; meanwhile, Hannah embarks on a campaign of psychological warfare against her husband, hoping to drive him mad and render him unfit for duty. Doll discovers their friendship when he intercepts a letter from Thomsen to Hannah. Humiliated, he tries to force Szmul to murder Hannah by threatening to have the prisoner’s wife brought to the camp; Szmul, however, reveals the plot to Hannah and is shot dead by Doll. Shortly afterward, Thomsen is arrested for sabotaging operations at a nearby factory that manufactures materials for the German war effort. A brief epilogue set in 1948 finds him working for the American denazification effort in Germany and desperate to reconnect with Hannah. He does, finally, but finds that she is eager to put the past behind her. As they part again at the close of the novel, he realizes the impossibility of rekindling a relationship formed under such terrible circumstances.

This plot synopsis may make the novel sound as though it is — at the very least — in monumentally poor taste: a sudsy melodrama about a Nazi love triangle set against the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. That it’s not so is thanks largely to Amis’s handling of point of view. The Zone of Interest is written from a first-person perspective that chapter by chapter cycles between three of the novel’s major characters: Doll, Thomsen, and Szmul. In giving a voice to the perpetrators as well as the victims of the genocide carried out at Auschwitz, Amis does not seek to humanize the former or suggest that they too deserve our pity. Instead, his dialogical approach serves to underscore the extent to which perpetrator and victim alike are dehumanized by their exposure to the camp’s horrors, though their dehumanization manifests itself in very different ways. The message of the novel, finally, is that if empathy is a precondition of humanity, then humanity is not possible in a place dedicated to the destruction of the other.

Particularly crucial to the articulation of this theme are Szmul’s chapters, which act as a counterweight to Doll’s and Thomsen’s, and capture the difficulty of resisting dehumanization as a prisoner at Auschwitz. Contemptuous of Szmul’s “willingness” to assist with the extermination of fellow Jews as a Sonderkommando, Doll regards him and the other Sonders as little more than animals who go about their tasks “with the dumbest indifference,” as if “it doesn’t matter at all to them that the people they process are their comrades in race, their siblings in blood” (Amis 67). Szmul’s narration makes clear that nothing could be further from the truth. The Sonders are in fact the “saddest men in the history of the world” because although they are innocent of the mass murder unfolding around them, they are made “disgusting” (34) by the work they are forced to perform among the dead and the doomed. The camp strips away their humanity little by little, ultimately leaving a hollow shell. As Szmul puts it, “something intrinsic to human interchange has absented itself” (79) from them, an absence evident in their haunted gaze. When the soul is gone, he says, “the eyes too are untenanted” (80). Still, the soul-killing nature of their work has not reduced them to beasts. They endure not out of a mindless instinct for survival, but in order to bear witness. Gathering in the evening, they read one another testimonies secretly written by slain colleagues and debate how to best — to most truthfully — record the horrors they have seen, which for Szmul include the execution of his two teenage sons. They also manage to “save a life (or prolong a life) at the rate of one per transport” (34) by pulling young, skilled arrivals aside before the selection process begins, subversively affirming the value of the people the camp was created to erase. And in the end, Szmul refuses to be the instrument of Doll’s revenge on Hannah. Rather than killing her, he plans to kill himself after disclosing the Commandant’s plot, proving, as he says in his final chapter, that: “my life is mine, and mine alone” (264). While Auschwitz may slowly dehumanize Szmul and his fellow Sonders, then, it does not succeed in rendering them inhuman or monstrous.

The same cannot be said for their Nazi overseers, as the chapters narrated by Doll and Thomsen show. Doll’s chapters, in particular, demonstrate how quickly human beings can become monsters in the absence of empathy for each other. Despite his self-serving protestations that he is “a normal man with normal feelings” (65), his narration reveals him to anything but. Not only is he manipulative, small-minded, and childish — qualities he no doubt possessed before becoming the Commandant of Auschwitz — he has also completely lost, as a consequence of the time he has spent in the Zone of Interest, any humanity he might have once had, becoming a grotesque, monstrous version of himself. His inhumanity is certainly evident in his treatment of the inmates.  He refers to the corpses of those murdered at the camp as “pieces” (32) or “the day’s natural wastage” (26), and scarcely has more regard for its living prisoners. He operates according to a relentlessly binary, amoral logic: “To be kind to the Jew is to be cruel to the German. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’: these concepts have had their time; they are gone” (66). And he is completely incapable of empathy for the other. Considering the failure of Szmul and the other Sonderkommandos to resist or rise up against their captors, he muses: “Ach, if they were real men — in their place I’d… But wait. You never are in anybody’s place” (68). Tellingly, though, this lack of empathy gradually extends to his fellow Germans, tainting his entire worldview. There is his blackmail and attempted murder of his own wife, of course. He also exploits a former social acquaintance who is found to have Romani ancestry and is imprisoned at Auschwitz, using her for sex and forcing her to have an abortion when she becomes pregnant. Doll’s camp-bred inhumanity even rears its head in idle moments, as when he’s attending a play staged for German officers and their wives and finds himself spending “the whole 2½ hours intently estimating how long it would take (given the high ceilings as against the humid conditions) to gas the audience, and wondering which of their clothes would be salvageable, and calculating how much their hair and gold fillings might fetch” (70).

While he does not descend to the level of monstrous depravity that Doll does, Thomsen’s chapters make clear that neither he nor Hannah escape the dehumanizing influence of Auschwitz. It enables his worst instincts, as he recognizes when he admits that he “derived much sexual advantage from [his] proximity to power” (50). And although he has nothing but disdain for the Commandant’s ardent devotion to the Final Solution, he must concede that he, too, is a cog in the machinery of death. As he says of himself and other disaffected Germans:

We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet and scuff the carpets and scratch the parquet, but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us . . . Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and you saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori (by many magnitudes), to the victims . . . And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs . . . and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were. (147-48, 281-82)

In the end, he is forced to confront the fact that his complicity — his willingness to go along — has exacted a terrible price: “Everything I had waived and ceded made itself known to me. And I saw, with self-detestation, how soiled and shrunken I had let my heart become” (159). Even after the war ends, it’s impossible for him to be fully human again, to lead a normal life. Hannah gently explains this to him when he tracks her down, hoping for a new life together: “You aren’t normal any longer, not to me. When I see you, I’m there again . . . Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place” (293-294). Or as Szmul puts it before his murder at Doll’s hands: “The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord — death of the soul. But the Germans have suffered it too . . . [I]t could not possibly be otherwise” (195). Men like Doll and Thomsen “were probably once very ordinary, ninety per cent of them. Ordinary, mundane, banal, commonplace — normal . . . But they are ordinary no longer” (196). The German “is not something supernatural, but neither is he something human. He is not the Devil. He is Death” (134).

As with Under the Skin, Glazer’s approach to adapting The Zone of Interest is instructive. Once again, he captures the novel in broad strokes, retaining its unusual focus on the perpetrators of the genocide at Auschwitz, particularly the Commandant and his family. He also preserves a number of the book’s finer details, including Doll’s idle musings about the volume of gas that would be needed to dispatch a roomful of his colleagues and its emphasis on the hellish soundscape of the camp. But his movie departs in significant ways from its source text. Glazer dispenses with the fig leaf of fictionalization, focusing the story squarely on the actual Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children Claus (Johann Karthaus), Hans (Luis Noah Witte), Inge-Brigit (Nele Ahrensmeier), Heideraud (Lilli Falk), and Annagret (Anastazja Drobniak, Celina Pękala, and Kalman Wilson). He restricts the action of the film entirely to Hösses’ lives. We never enter the camp, though we see it looming behind their garden wall; we never witness the atrocities committed against its victims, though evidence of them is omnipresent. Gone, too, are the novel’s romantic triangle and murder plot. Thomsen and Szmul are absent from the story, as are most of Amis’s minor characters. Perhaps most notably, Glazer drops the novel’s rotating first-person point-of-view in favor of one that is unwaveringly objective, meaning that, as in his adaptation of Under the Skin, we are often left to guess at his characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

And yet it is clear watching his version of The Zone of Interest that Glazer is laser-focused on Amis’s central theme: the way in which Auschwitz disallows empathy, dehumanizing everyone in its ambit including the perpetrators, who have become monstrous in their refusal to recognize the personhood of the prisoners. This is certainly true where Höss is concerned. He regards the inmates he oversees as objects or things. When he meets in one early scene with the representatives of an engineering firm to discuss the construction of a new, more efficient crematorium, the prisoners are referred to individually as “pieces” and collectively as “loads.” He also treats them as tainted or unclean. When he and two of his children come into contact with the incinerated remains of inmates that have been dumped into a river near the camp, he rushes them home to be scoured with brushes in the bath. Later, he vigorously scrubs his genitals in his basement sink after raping a female prisoner. He identifies far more with animals — his beloved horse, the family dog — than he does with them. Tellingly, his lack of empathy takes a toll. Like Doll, he finds himself growing indifferent even to the personhood of his fellow Germans, whom he imagines gassing at a gala for Nazi officers. By the end of the film, he has become physically ill. He visits a doctor and later vomits on the stairwell in his office building. At this moment, he is somehow granted a vision of employees at the present-day Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum going about their work — sweeping the floor of the crematorium, wiping down a glass display filled with piles of discarded shoes, vacuuming a hallway hung with portraits of the camp’s victims. But his glimpse of the future has no discernable effect: after a moment, he continues down the stairway, descending into darkness.

The rest of his family, too, has been made monstrous by their residence in the Zone of Interest. A far cry from the Amis’s Hannah, Hedwig is, if anything, more unapologetic than Höss in her lack of empathy for the other. She continually presses her husband to bring her the belongings of the those murdered at the camp, requesting chocolate, perfume, lingerie. We watch her trying on a woman’s fur coat and dabbing on the lipstick she finds in the pocket. She gossips with the other officers’ wives about a diamond she found hidden in a tube of toothpaste. Her avarice is boundless; even Höss teases her about it. And the inhuman cruelty that informs it is on constant display in their home, particularly in her treatment of her Polish servants. After one displeases her, she coldly declares: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” She embraces the title Höss has jokingly bestowed on her — “the queen of Auschwitz” — and reacts with fury when she discovers that he has been promoted and will be transferred back to Germany, telling him in no uncertain terms that she and the children won’t be joining him: “They’d have to drag me out of here.” The children, meanwhile, have been impacted by their time in the Zone of Interest as well. One of their daughters has developed a sleep disorder and walks their home at night like a restless ghost. Their eldest son, a member of the Hitler Youth, keeps a collection of human teeth in his bedroom and in one scene locks his younger brother in their greenhouse and pretends to gas him. While their life outside the camp, then, may appear idyllic on the surface — consisting of family picnics, garden parties, birthday celebrations, and loving moments between husband and wife, parents and children — it has clearly come with a heavy price. The only family member who seems to recognize this is Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge), who visits the Hösses for a few days. She initially marvels at the life her daughter has built for herself, but over the course of her stay becomes more and more distressed by the proximity of the camp. Finally, after a night of staring at the orange glow of the crematorium through her bedroom window, a handkerchief over her nose to mask the smell, she departs without warning — leaving only a note for Hedwig, who, upon reading it, promptly burns it in the stove. Perhaps she alone understands the extent to which the family has traded their humanity for the “living space” they have claimed.

I say “perhaps” because, again, Glazer forbids us access to his characters’ inner lives in The Zone of Interest, injecting a certain amount of ambiguity around their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. At the same time, however, he employs an array of cinematic devices to communicate the film’s themes, just as he does in his adaptation of Under the Skin. Visually speaking, he develops what Amy Herzog calls “a new vocabulary for representing fascism” (10). Working with production designer Chris Oddy and cinematographer Łukasz Żal, Glazer meticulously recreated the Hösses’ home a short distance from the actual site next to Auschwitz and rigged a system of remote-control cameras and hidden microphones to capture the actors performing in this space while the crew remained out of sight in a nearby trailer — a setup he has wryly referred to in interviews as “like Big Brother in the Nazi house” (qtd. in O’Hagan). The goal was to come as close as possible to an “un-authored” film, to “stand back from the characters and look at them anthropologically” (qtd. in O’Hagan). As Glazer puts it, “I wasn’t interested in their dramas. I just wanted to watch them in as unimpeded a way as possible to see how they behaved and acted, to see who they were” (qtd. in O’Hagan). His interest, though, isn’t simply in realism — however clinical or detached. Glazer doesn’t just record the Hösses as they go about their lives; he reveals what they have become as the result of the lives they lead. The “unaesthetic and objective” visual style he developed with Żal assiduously avoids anything “overly emotional or manipulative” (Emmons) in the depiction of the film’s protagonists. It largely eschews close-ups, for example, framing the action in wide shots instead. It also utilizes natural light (often the strong light of the midday sun) and practical lights with no reflectors, flags, or fills, meaning that the actors often appear with “ugly front light and shadows on the faces” (Żal qtd. in Emmons). It’s an approach that, in Żal’s words, goes “completely against the rules of filmmaking,” (qtd. in Emmons) producing images that are singularly flat and unappealing, lacking the kind of focus, balance, and contrast associated with “good” cinematography. Yet it creates a necessary critical detachment in the audience, one that prevents us from automatically identifying with the movie’s main characters. It also enables us to see that their existence, which seems paradisiacal to them, is in fact empty and dead — a monstrous parody of domestic bliss.

Interestingly, Glazer also offers a visual counterpoint to these scenes. The film occasionally breaks away from the Hösses to focus on a teenage girl who braves death under the cover of darkness to hide apples at the work sites where the camp’s prisoners labor during the day. This character, who is based on an actual fourteen-year-old member of the Polish resistance named Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk (and played in the film by Julia Polaczek), is the only humane, empathetic figure shown in the movie. As Glazer notes, her “small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light” (qtd. in O’Hagan). Accordingly, he films her quite differently than other characters. Her scenes were shot using a thermal imaging camera, which yielded spectral black and white images resembling photo negatives that were then sharpened using artificial intelligence. Their eeriness suggests that her empathy for the other is alien in the insane, upside-down world the Nazis have invented at Auschwitz. This, it will be noted, is the reverse of the approach to mise-en-scène in Under the Skin, which links inhumanity with uncanny, black and white spaces and empathy with real-world locations — fitting, given that The Zone of Interest is in every respect the mirror image of its predecessor. Inverting both the visual scheme and the thematic focus of his prior film, Glazer “create[s] an ethical crisis for the viewer, who is left questioning the mechanics, and the limits, of empathy” (Herzog 10).

Sound is the other cinematic device used in the movie to evoke the dehumanization that can occur in the absence of empathy. As Glazer has said, The Zone of Interest is “in effect, two films . . . The one you see, and the one you hear, and the second is just as important as the first, arguably more so” (qtd. in O’Hagan). Although we see only indirect evidence of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz — blood being washed off the Commandant’s boots after a day at the camp, the belching smokestacks of the crematorium, human ashes being spread over the soil in the Hösses’ garden — aural evidence of them is omnipresent, thanks to the multilayered and heartbreaking work of sound designer Johnnie Burn. As we watch the Höss family go about their daily activities, we hear the death and devastation upon which their life is built. Gun shots. Guttural shouts. Screams of terror. The clanking of machinery. The whistles of arriving trains. And underneath virtually every scene, becoming almost subliminal in its ubiquity, the rumbling of the furnaces. These sounds interact with and inflect those associated with the Hösses’ home, lending everyday domestic noises like children playing, dogs barking, bees buzzing, and babies crying a strange, disconcerting dissonance — defamiliarizing them, rendering them ominous. Only rarely do the Hösses themselves become aware of the sounds of the camp, as when Hedwig’s mother, napping in the garden, is disturbed by the crackle of gunfire, or when young Hans, playing in his bedroom, overhears his father ordering a prisoner to be drowned in the river for fighting over an apple. Otherwise, they are oblivious — yet another testament to their dehumanization.

Music plays a key role in shaping our perception of the film’s characters as well. Although it’s used sparingly, the score, once again composed by Mica Levi, is crucial in this regard. Like Under the Skin, The Zone of Interest begins with Levi’s music over a black screen. Here, it is almost choral in nature: what sound like synthesized voices pulse and undulate, gradually decreasing in pitch. Levi has explained that: “The music, like the dark screen, is a way of preparing you for what follows as you enter another reality . . . It slowly descends in pitch as it takes you down into the story. All through the film, the music is taking you to a place below or beyond what you are seeing, almost a nowhere place beyond logical comprehension” (qtd. in O’Hagan). During the scenes involving Aleksandra’s heroic efforts to keep the inmates at Auschwitz from starving by leaving apples at their work sites, the audio track is punctuated by startling, foghorn-like blasts of sound that perhaps serve to signal the mortal risk she’s taking or, like the eerie thermal imaging, suggest the alienness of her acts of kindness in this inhumane environment. And at the conclusion of the film, Levi reverses the composition of the opening track, unleashing a series of rapidly crescendoing choral voices that keen and wail, bringing us back up out of the story, but also giving expression to the pain and anguish the Hösses have attempted to ignore and repress. It’s important to mention another use of music in the film, as well — this one more hopeful, and diegetic rather than non-diegetic. On one of her nighttime excursions, Aleksandra finds a roll of paper hidden in a tin at a work site and takes it with her. At home, she discovers that it is sheet music composed by a prisoner, the real-life German-Polish historian and Holocaust survivor Joseph Wulf, who wrote it at Auschwitz in 1943. She sits at her family’s piano and begins to play the piece. As she sounds the notes, the lyrics appear in subtitles on the screen: “Sunbeams / radiant and warm / Human bodies / Young and old / And we /who are imprisoned here / Our hearts / are not yet cold / Souls afire / like the blazing sun / Tearing, breaking / through their pain / For soon we’ll see / that waving flag / The flag of freedom / yet to come” (Wulf). Though we are granted only fugitive glimpses of Auschwitz’s victims in Glazer’s film, then, they feature significantly on its soundtrack. And while that soundtrack registers their unfathomable suffering, it also bears witness to their indominable will to survive and their insistence on their own humanity in the face of those who wish to strip it from them.

As I suggested at the outset of this essay, Glazer’s interest in empathy and its absence is not confined to Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest. His second film, Birth (2004), explores the theme of recognition and empathy with the fable of a New York City socialite who is confronted by a ten-year-old boy claiming to be the reincarnation of her dead husband. Glazer has said that Birth is “about an alien coming into an environment . . . and disrupting it” (qtd. in Epstein), which makes it akin to Under the Skin. Although the “alien” is in this case an uncanny child — and the story is told not from his point of view but from the widow’s — the film revolves in the same way around a transformational encounter between self and other. Ultimately, the question of whether or not the boy is actually the reincarnation of the protagonist’s husband is less important than the fact that his appearance leads to a kind of reawakening or rebirth for her. Conversely, Glazer’s 1997 music video for Radiohead’s “Karma Police” anticipates The Zone of Interest in its chilling depiction of where the absence of empathy often leads. It puts the band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, in the backseat of a Chrysler New Yorker pursuing a man down a deserted road at night. As the man, pinned in the car’s headlights, desperately tries to escape, Yorke mouths the song’s menacing lyrics: “This is what you get / When you mess with us” (“Karma Police”). The fact that the video is shot largely from the perspective of the car’s faceless driver puts viewers behind the wheel, implicating us in the terrorization of the anonymous other fleeing the vehicle. And the fact that it ends with the pursued turning the tables on the pursuer — the man lights a trail of gasoline leaking from the car, causing it to become engulfed in flames as we reverse frantically back up the road — drives home the point that such terrorization, regardless of how “karmically right” it might feel, dehumanizes everyone involved. Glazer’s more recent short film The Fall (2019) makes a similar point. It begins with a man cornered in a tree by a silent mob. After shaking him out and posing for a snapshot with their captive— an eerie touch that recalls the way in which public lynchings of Black men were frequently photographed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America — they tie a rope around his neck and drop him into a seemingly bottomless well. Disconcertingly, all the actors wear masks: the features on those worn by members of the mob are contorted in hate and rage, while the expression on the mask worn by the victim is frozen in fear. The masks effectively capture how mob violence, and the us/them mentality that tends to feed it, robs perpetrator and the victim alike of both their individuality and their humanity. And while the short’s coda reveals that the intended victim has managed to stop his fall down the well, it remains an open question whether he will be able to climb out without help. In the absence of empathy, the film seems to be saying, our survival as a species is not assured.

Glazer’s interest in empathy and its absence arguably reaches an apogee in Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest, however. As I have suggested, these films can be viewed as companion pieces or mirror images of one another in their treatment of empathy as a precondition of humanity. If Under the Skin is a testament to the power of empathy to make a human being out of a monster, The Zone of Interest demonstrates that when we lose our capacity for empathy, our humanity slips away. Significantly, both frame empathy as the result of a rational rather than an emotional connection with the other; furthermore, both invite our empathy for others through an appeal to reason rather than emotion. By virtue of his careful approach to adaptation in each case — his alteration of the narrative point of view of his source text, his substitution of cinematic devices that distance for literary conventions that immerse — Glazer invites us to think about the transformational power of empathy and the terrible consequences that can accompany its absence. This isn’t to say that these two films don’t also elicit powerful emotional responses, especially in their depiction of the suffering of others. But they resolutely eschew the potentially problematic sentimentality common in movies that explore or evoke empathy in favor of a more detached approach that Bloom associates with rational compassion. In so doing, they respond to the question posed by Glazer in his Oscars acceptance speech — “How do we resist the dehumanization that can occur any time we refuse to see ourselves in others?” (The 96th Academy Awards) — with an answer both timely and relevant.