Forget the Oscars. It’s just a terrible movie

As I sat in the movie theater a few weeks ago, eager to watch Jonathan Glazer’s movie “The Zone of Interest,” I overheard the conversation of a couple sitting right behind me. It was evident that the pair were not Jewish, and while they were interested in learning more about the Holocaust, it was evident that they knew very little about this most terrible and cruel genocide of modern times. I reiterate, the Holocaust stands as the most terrible genocide of modern times, not only because of the number of innocent victims, which, depending on how we define it, ranges between 7 and 11 million (the closest one, the Ukrainian genocide of Holodomor in the 1930s, had between 3 and 5 million victims), but also in terms of its cruelty—the systematic development of a killing industry that reduced human dignity to an assembly line of corpses and ashes.

All of this occurred before the Academy Awards ceremony, preceding the infamous speech by a Jew who had the audacity to compare Israel’s war with Hamas to the Holocaust, attempting to “refute” his Jewishness and hypocritically criticizing the “hijacking” of the Holocaust while profiting from it by making a movie about it. Therefore, as I sat in the movie theater watching his work, I was unaware that any of that would happen. I simply knew that I was watching a movie about the banalization of life during the Holocaust—a movie that actually, purposefully or unintendedly, urged empathy for Rudolph Höss, the cruel and inhuman commander of the Auschwitz extermination camp, responsible for the murder of over a million people.

While watching, I overheard comments from the non-Jewish couple behind me: “Oh, well, the Holocaust wasn’t that bad,” “Jews worked as servants in the houses of Nazis,” and “they had pretty gardens.” Of course, they didn’t grasp the deeper meaning. Much of the movie relies on subtext—the sounds of trains and screams in the background, the smokestacks rising from the grim chimneys next to the house, the subtle comments from the wives of Nazi commanders. All of this is powerful if you have context; it is meaningless if you don’t. For a non-Jewish couple with limited knowledge of the Holocaust, the movie might appear to be about a personable and attractive young officer trying to impress his superiors to stay in a picturesque house with beautiful gardens and please his attractive wife.

Regardless of what occurred at the Oscars, after watching “The Zone of Interest,” I turned to my fiancée and said, “It is a BAD Holocaust movie.” It is a bad Holocaust movie because any good movie, like Schindler´s List or The Pianist, should leave you shaken and disgusted, or at least with the knowledge that 6,000,000 innocent civilians were persecuted, tortured, and systematically killed simply because they were Jewish. Similar to other bad Holocaust movies like “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,” which make you empathize and feel sorry for the Nazi boy instead of the thousands of Jewish boys being exterminated at the same time, this movie, without context, conveys a completely erroneous message and feeling.

I am no movie critic, but if I were, and without reference to what Glazer said at the Academy Award Ceremony, I would give this movie exactly the same number of yellow stars we see on screen: zero.