(CNN) – “The Hot Spot,” Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-nominated period drama, is technically a film about the Holocaust.
The film focuses on the real life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who lead an idyllic and seemingly everyday life alongside the infamous concentration camp.
But viewers never see the unspeakable horrors unfolding just beyond the garden wall. Instead, they listen to them.
You hear them in the muffled screams, the piercing moans, and the piercing gunshots. You hear them in the distant noise of the trains and the constant hum of the incinerator.
“I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to recreate these atrocities with actors and extras,” director Glazer said in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour in February. “I feel like these images are something we all know and are burned into our consciousness as they are. Sound is, of course, interpretative. “We can see these images in our heads because we hear these sounds.”
In a film otherwise lacking in spectacle, “The Hot Spot’s” sound design is something of a protagonist. (In interviews, Glazer has said that “The Zone of Interest” consists of two films: “the one you see and the one you hear.”)
These ambient noises are a pervasive, unnerving reminder of the evil that the Höss family is involved in. They point out to the public that Höss, his wife Hedwig, and even their children know full well that millions of Jews and others are being murdered. Day after day they simply managed to switch off.
“In other words, it’s out of sight but never out of mind,” Glazer told Amanpour.
The Oscar-nominated film “Zone of Interest” focuses on Nazi commander Rudolf Höss and his family. Just opposite the picturesque garden is the Auschwitz concentration camp. Courtesy of A24
However, constructing an informed account of the Holocaust was no easy task.
Sound designer Johnnie Burn, whose works include “Poor Things” and “Nope,” compiled 600 pages of research into the sounds that would have been heard in the death camp during World War II, IndieWire's Sarah Shachat wrote in an article titled “How’s Hotspot”. uses our ears like no other film. This includes everything from planes, trains and cars of the time to testimonies from survivors describing what happened in the camp.
Burn has said in interviews that he spent a year putting together the audio that forms the film's spooky background. The effort required a lot of creativity: Instead of hiring artists to recreate the sounds of human suffering, he told IndieWire that he collected field recordings from places where those sounds could be heard organically, such as the 2022 Paris riots.
“No matter how good an actor you are, faking the pain of serious injury or death is a very difficult thing,” Burn told IndieWire. “And the film itself has such a documentary, natural and realistic feel to it that anything remotely wooden isn't going to work.”
Burn also said in an interview on the Slate podcast “Working” that he recorded audio recordings of voices from several European cities to accurately represent all the nationalities represented at Auschwitz. To ensure that the engine sounds were accurate to the period, he sought help from a man in Estonia who had a collection of German motorcycles from World War II.
Another challenge for Burn and his team was figuring out how noticeable the sounds of Auschwitz would have been in real life. At the urging of the film's production designer, he eventually increased the listening intensity.
“There were a tremendous amount of people and things coming and going every day, and I think (Glazer) and I knew that and we did our research, but somehow, I don't know, maybe.” [se sintió] disrespectful. But we were too careful with the sound, so we left it out and added a lot more,” Burn told IndieWire.
The resulting noise is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film. And although the film received some criticism for its superficial treatment of the Holocaust, Burns's aural performance earned it recognition in the industry: “The Zone of Interest” won the BAFTA Award for Best Sound as well as the top prize at the London Critics' Ceremony. Circular awards. The film also received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Sound and Best Picture.
While The Hot Zone is ostensibly a film about the Holocaust, Glazer and producer James Wilson have said its message remains more urgent than ever. “It seems glaring at the moment that we should care about innocent people dying in Gaza or Yemen,” Wilson said at the BAFTAs. “That’s exactly how we feel about the innocent people who were murdered in Mariupol or in Israel.”
“To me, this wall is an expression of how we compartmentalize the suffering of others (and normalize the suffering of others to some degree) in order to protect and preserve our own comfort and safety,” Glazer told CNN.
Essentially, says Glazer, the “zone of interest” is about what we can pay attention to and what we can ignore.
“It's not about saying, 'Look what they did,'” he said. “He says, 'Look what we're doing.'”