Kill James Bond! - S4E26.5: The Zone of Interest [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Some streams come to a head in this episode, as we discuss Jonathan Glazer's film of our time, The Zone of Interest. Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his family in a house just off the camp itself. ----- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello. Hello. And we're really here to ask, what if we made the whole episode? out of the jarring shift in tone? Yes, yes, yes.

What if we started with a jarring tone and just stayed there? We're going to be flipping the switch between Mordland and irreverent a lot in this podcast. It's staying heavily on Mordland. What if we did an episode of our comedy podcast about films and talked about the film, the zone of interest? Mm-hmm. Yes. Which, Abby, this was your pick, right?

It was. It was. I enjoy the work of Jonathan Glazer. We've done a couple of his films on the podcast before. And also, I just figured it's a really good film. And I do, in fact, have one very funny thing to say about it. Listeners, if you're not familiar, a zone of interest is a 20, 23 film, which is about Rudolph Hoss, who ran Out Switch.

So, strap in for a fun time. It's not a laugh riot, no. It's a Jonathan Glazer film, too. So there's a lot of, like, horror. It's a very sparse, very deliberately hot. horrifying film about the Holocaust, but also not exclusively about the Holocaust. And one of the things that we should say, I think it's best to get up front with this, is when Jonathan Glazer was accepting the Oscar for this, he made very explicit that for him

making this film is also an allegory for the genocide in Gaza. Absolutely. And, you know, you can generalize it beyond that to any genocide and also any kind of of willful ignorance of human suffering. Yeah, that's absolutely. It's about ignoring the genocide that is happening right on your doorstep. Or I guess with regards to the Gaza genocide, it's happening like live on our phones. But it's very much the same act of willful ignorance over something that you can find out about really easily.

Yes. A film that I want to do at some point is the act of killing, which is a documentary about perpetrating a genocide. and using a kind of filmic lens to sort of distance yourself from it. And it's another one of those kind of defense mechanisms. But yeah, so the zone of interest is on its most sort of facial level, almost sort of pseudo-documentary, really. Yeah, just sort of three days in the life of the Hesse's. Yeah, yeah.

Rudolf Huss, who is the commander, the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. and we begin with that family and we don't introduce them we don't give you any context for this this is just a family by a river in the countryside we assume you know from context that this is the Zola River

in Poland but we don't we're not told that we that's the first thing we see but the first thing we hear is several minutes beforehand because it's like a five minute long almost like black screen right at the start with this haunting soundscape

Yeah. Jonathan Glazer, he's talking about like this being on purpose because you're sort of immersing yourself into watching this movie. It's not just visual. It's going to be sound based. You're going to want to listen. It really is. That's really, really smart. And like the music, it kind of is like Ocarina of Time Shadow Temple. There's a lot of like unclear noises and voices and sliding notes that descend and descend. It feels, it sounds like the feeling of being in a lift that's going down. Yeah, yeah. And we're just like, oh, no. It has some similarities to under the skin, which I highly recommend you both watch in itself and also go back and listen to our episode about it because there's a lot to talk about in those films are sort of in dialogue with each other. Yeah. I mean, I say this every time we do a Jonathan Glazer film that I think he makes like the

film of that decade. And I think this is the film of the second, yes. The 2020s, a decade we are only halfway through. He already did it. And it's feeling, yeah, like it's going to get worse. It's the current vibe of the 2020s, yes. It is, it is. And mixed in with your kind of your synths and stuff in this sort of audio landscape are like birdsong,

chanting, sounds a bit kind of church Slavonic to me, but what do I know? And you're kind of immersed into all of this. And then you get this shot of this, like, beautiful countryside, family, family, sort of on holiday and your first shot of the guy who you will later learn to be Rudolph Huss, is common down to Valshowitz. He's looking, he's standing in front of his family in extremely stupid swimming trunks. Yes. He's ridiculous, yeah, straight away.

Yeah. Yeah. He's very, very pale. He's very white. He also has, as he did in real life, just an atrocious haircut. Yeah, it looks like a reverse Dracula flow. It's diabolical. Just like.

I could talk. for an hour about Rudolph Huss's haircut and this right, because this movie makes a decision to not really emphasize, but depict how weird and alien the Nazis were on a surface level where a lot of films, like, Judgments at Nuremberg, it does a very didactic thing where it's like, anyone can be a Nazi, you, a good American, could be a Nazi, right? And this movie also does that, but it does that in a deft away, and one of the things that it doesn't feel the need to do is to change the image of the Nazis to be more legible to you. The strangeness is part of the point.

And so this guy having just the most fucked up haircut you've ever seen in your life is important in that sense. I think it's a very conscious decision. And after the war, after the Nuremberg war crime trials, there was the much lesser publicized Nuremberg fashion crime trials where a number of people were executed actually as well they might have been as well they should be Well they actually took that much more seriously in Germany

than the war crime stuff Yeah So the family sort of Like go swimming in this river Yeah You know go for a walk in the woods Two sons Like a daughter, a young daughter

Like an infant Visibly Aryan family Like all orange Yeah every shot in this movie You start out with this one they're all, like, medium length or long shots, and they're all held forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, again, you've got that kind of pseudo-documentary thing of, we've set up the camera

with a tripod, and it's just going to observe, you know? It's like a nature documentary, almost. Your eyes have time to, like, pick over every part of the scene, which is usually, like, necessary, because there are things in the background. There's lots of little things. And if we talked about every little thing, we'd be here for five hours, but the family. They head home, and it's dark by the time they get home. Their number plates do have the SS logos on, which is our first kind of timing, time period indicator.

If you weren't sort of like aware of the context of that, the big SS number plate would be your first kind of clue. Yeah, if this was coming on like Channel 4 and you didn't know what it was about, you'd be like, oh, Nazis, holy shit. Interesting as well, to start with the kind of empathy driving thing of like stressful family outing. Yeah, the kids are like arguing about nothing in the back seat. You see them coming back from the river and like Rudolph is like cradling his infant daughter, which immediately is something that makes you empathize. You have your whole kind of like white noise family as the cradle of the world's misinformation kind of chaos firing off. And then you get the sort of like black Mercedes with the SS number plates.

And that's not like a huge sort of stomach churning like drop. There isn't a musical sting for that. it's a perfectly ordinary progression of shots and then they drive home and the kind of realization that oh these are Nazis right these are like serious Nazis these are the fucking SS is not something that is allowed to disrupt the narrative at all

yeah so it's dark when they get home and Rudolph and his wife Hedwig go to bed and because the movie has taught us to listen we can hear a little bit of noise from our I don't know, like it could be a restaurant air conditioning unit maybe. Like this machinery sort of in the distance. Something in the street. It's mechanical.

Yeah. Yeah, it could be anything. Who knows? I think of this as the audio, right? And this is the sort of the film within the film, right, is the audio sort of soundscape that you do not see, I'll talk about not seeing in a lot more detail later on. Yes. In the meantime, you just have to know that there's this like loud enough to be noticeable

and distracting audio that's not shown because you get a very tightly composed shot of this house, which is like a kind of generic, like kind of upper middle class, but a bit small, a bit tawdry kind of German, Polish house. And as the shot moves from that to the next shot, which is the hearse's indoors separate beds in their bedroom, the audio is still going. It's not any quieter. and it just keeps persisting

and it will do basically throughout the rest of the movie at different levels. Yes, definitely. It's like ever-present. This is kind of rumbling. It's his birthday now. Next day, it's Rudolph's a damn birthday boy. Yeah, his kids blindfold him and lead him outside.

He is wearing a Nazi uniform, incidentally, but the movie, again, doesn't make a big deal out of it. Yeah. The blindfolding and the sort of being sort of march downstairs is evocative of the firing squad or you know the execution in general but it's also kind of undignified and again this movie doesn't really miss an opportunity to both it's not really subverting the horror but it's like the horror coexist with the kind of human dipshittery of these people of to be like this guy who is is you know getting driven around in the frightening car was not 10 minutes before standing around

with his dick prominently visible through his incredibly goofy swimming trunks and is sort of like now being like led around by his kids blindfolded because it's his birthday even though he's wearing the SS uniform. Hmm. And they give him a boat

like a brand new, a brand new boat and he's like, oh thanks guys, that's so nice if you like, oh look and take you all out in it soon. He's kind to his children and then it's all facing one way. The boat is sort of backed against a hedge and then you get the reverse shot

which actually is intended to be the makes your stomach drop one where you see the guard tower of the kind of like heavily photographed memorable shape and you go that's the guard tower in Auschwitz yeah you're like oh that's Auschwitz yeah you see all of a sudden

that one wall of this garden is concrete blocks it's like barbed wire and there are just like buildings like these big industrial looking buildings just going back into the distance Yeah. This is our first shot of The Wall, which will be very present. And he's like, right, time for kids, time to go to school. Time for me to go to work in Auschwitz. By the way, the wall is like 10 feet away. It's not like in the distance. It's like you could walk to it in second. It's like literally on that doorstep. And it's sort of tall enough that you can't see over it standing, but you can see buildings over it, right? Which is an important sort of middle ground. But so he gets to work by horse as well, which we see the horse be prepared for him by prisoners, right?

We see prisoners in concentration camp uniforms only at a distance in the middle distance. Yeah, they're like stripes. Yeah. He sees people walking around wearing him, but just only in the distance. And we see him sort of mount his horse. He rides into the camp. The guards salute him because he's their commander and he disappears. And there's an interesting class positioning here of there's a sort of uncertain pseudo-aristocracy of riding your horse the like, I don't know, 20 feet or whatever, to work from your sort of bourgeois house, right?

This is not a kind of normal, natural thing to do. This is a weird thing to do. It's surreal to see this horse appear. Yeah, it's like ceremonial almost. Yeah, absolutely. Because if you think of the Holocaust's kind of historical role as the sort of unprecedented mechanization of genocide, which is something this movie is going to talk about, it's something that's in dialogue with under the skin about, then to have your kind of throwback thing of, yeah, and I go to work on horseback is it's a fetish in that sense, you know? It's a kind of, it's an affectation. You could drive, you could walk, but you don't.

You get a horse to work in the concentration camp. Why do you do that? Because you're kind of imagining yourself as an aristocrat in some way. You're imagining yourself as being landed. And that's something that we'll learn more about Rudolph later on. Yes, definitely. But we stick with the family. Yeah, we see some more prisoners, or it's not entirely clear if they are.

There's people in grey uniforms who are delivering things to the house, pushing barrows around and stuff. Something that really struck me the first time I... Functionally, these are slaves. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Something that struck me, though, when I first saw this movie, it's like, the movie doesn't stop to explain,

especially if you don't know the historical uniforms and who's who. It's not immediately obvious that, like, these people are slaves. It's not immediately obvious, like, visually, like, who is Jewish and who isn't, or, like, who is Polish and who isn't. But that is obviously a hierarchy that, like, the hosses absolutely fucking see with their eyes and, like, structures the whole fucking world. But, like, it took me, like, a couple of minutes to be like, oh, who's this guy pushing a wheelbarrow?

Oh, fuck! it's so like normal because it's so normalised for the horses Yeah Yeah you get like It's the first proper shot of Of Auschwitz is this like almost planometric Like Wes Anderson-esque shot of this prisoner

It's functionally as you say a slave Pushing a wheelbarrow full of things up to the house And he goes the whole length Of the building And it's just it's behind the fence the whole time But it's always right fucking there Yeah Yeah and he delivers their groceries

This is a servant they have staff And we see that they're inside the house, they have maids. They have multiple maids who take this delivery. And... It's Devin. I'm cutting in. You know what time it is. If you want to hear the rest of this episode of Kill James Bond, you are going to have to go to patreon.com slash kill James Bond,

all one word, and sign up today for as little as five pounds a month. I'll have to put my finger on a scale, but... I don't know, seems kind of worth it, right?