‘The Zone of Interest’ Sound Design Shows How We’re All Complicit in Atrocities

The Zone of Interest has earned wide critical acclaim, winning the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. At a November 19 screening in Los Angeles, sound designer Johnnie Burn explained his approach to one of the film’s most memorable elements—and revealed a chilling parallel to real life.

The Zone of Interest is writer and director Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing examination of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family, who lived in an upscale house and garden next to the camp. As Rudolf, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children go about their lives in the film, a cacophony of rumbles, gunshots, screams, and other sounds drift over the wall separating them from the barracks and crematoria. These sounds are based on what the family would have actually heard each day.

“I quickly realized we would need to know everything about what sounds would have been heard in Auschwitz in that period of time, and how it would have been heard, the physicality within that space,” Burn explained at the Q and A. “The first year was really about research, understanding the planes, the guns, and the things that happened in that period in that time, and also reading witness testimony, and understanding the more difficult sounds that we would hear coming from over the wall.”

Burn compiled his research into a “library of sounds” that Glazer and his crew could play over the scenes of the Höss family in their home. The result is harrowing: although the family sometimes reacts to a particularly startling event happening over the wall, for the most part, they don’t seem to notice or care about what’s clearly going on over the wall.

When asked about the volume of the sounds, Burn revealed something startling. “We approached [the sound volume] very scientifically,” he said. “I literally had a map where I had all the distances [between the house and locations within the camp], and I knew where the executions were, and we recorded guns at the correct distances, and people’s voices, so things were as they should be. But there was a weird phenomenon when mixing it, where we noticed that when we played the film through from the beginning, it would sound correct … but if we played it from an hour in, everything would sound too loud.

“I thought there was some mistake, that I had pushed the wrong button or whatever,” Burn explained. “But obviously it’s because you dial it out.” In other words, the longer you listen to the sounds of the camp, the less you notice them.

The result is a disturbing commonality between the audience and the characters. The real Höss and his wife were Nazis who committed acts of unspeakable evil. It’s easy to distance ourselves from them—to convince ourselves that we could never become such irredeemable monsters—but that illusion crumbles when we realize that our minds are already tuning out the very atrocities that the film condemns. If it’s this easy to tune out the sounds of murder, what else are we tuning out every day?

The Zone of Interest comes out in theaters on December 15.

(featured image: A24)