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Though it’s been seven months, I remain haunted by “The Zone of Interest.” When I first watched writer-director Jonathan Glazer ’s radical take on the Holocaust back in May, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what was so startling about it. There have been many films on this horrific chapter in history—from “Night and Fog” to “ Schindler's List ” to “ The Pianist ,” and as recently as “Occupied City”—all asking the viewer to bear witness to unfathomable suffering under a genocidal regime’s brutality. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis ’ same-titled novel as him asking viewers to simply witness. It’s a disturbing work, guided by a discomforting sense of immaculateness that chills the viewer. It is the sanitation the film performs, which speaks to the now, in a way few Holocaust films have done before.  

You could, of course, accuse Glazer’s film of merely being a formal exercise. He challenges himself to not only work purely through atmosphere, but also takes the risk of telling this story from a German perspective. Rudolf Höss ( Christian Friedel ) is the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. When he first appears on-screen, he is with his wife Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ) and their children, relaxing at the riverside, in a verdant field surrounded by lush mountains. Soon we are introduced to their dream house, a tall concrete structure surrounded by a lavish yard and seemingly even taller walls. On the other side of these barriers is the camp itself. Outside of a single shot—a low angle of Rudolf, framed by black smoking billowing in the background—we never really see inside the camp. Instead, viewers are asked to aurally visualize. Much has been explained by Glazer about the two movies occurring within “The Zone of Interest” (the one perceived through sight and the other through sound). That tension is obvious, yet no less powerful. 

Much has also been made of the banality of evil. The Höss family live next door to ongoing genocide yet never comment on the horrific screams or the smell of death nearby. Thus, there is an expected coldness which seeps into the film’s lack of sentimentality. They raise their children under a pretense of normalcy—Rudolf tells them late-night bedtime stories, takes them horseback riding, and participates in other pastoral pursuits. Because of the emotional blankness, a burden falls on Friedel and Hüller to chart a tricky course: How human can you make someone who is clearly inhuman? Friedel gives nothing away, relying on a cold stoicism that translates to his frigid posture. Hüller is a tad slipperier, a vicious rattlesnake with a blade for a tail. If not for their performances, you could see how Glazer’s framing could easily go left.   

But that feeling isn’t anything new for Glazer: “ Birth ” was widely criticized for its ending and the on-screen relationship between Nicole Kidman and Cameron Bright . “ Under the Skin ,” though better received critically, walks a fine feminist line. Those films, along with his debut “ Sexy Beast ,” witnessed Glazer pushing his audio-visual storytelling toward leaner, angular compositions and a dynamic sense of sound capable of unnerving the viewer. In “The Zone of Interest,” with cinematographer Lukasz Zal , he furthers those two desires, often linking domestic spaces causally to exterior sound: When a train rumbles by, bringing more Jewish people, a package comes to the house with stockings presumably taken from the murdered occupants of the previous train. On Rudolf’s side of the wall, the family celebrates life (birthdays and social gatherings) while death occurs on the other side.      

The close correlation speaks to the repulsively intimate relationship Rudolf and his family have with destruction. They profit off an entire people’s death in unspeakable ways: In one scene, one of Rudolf’s sons has a flashlight in bed. But he’s not rifling at a comic book in the dark; he’s rummaging through his collection of gold teeth. In another scene, Hedwig receives a fur coat. She tries on the fine pelt, twisting her body to catch her every angle in the mirror. In one of the pockets, she discovers the previous owner's lipstick; in the next scene she tries the lipstick on. Their easeful proximity to murder is thrown in stark relief when Hedwig’s mother arrives. At first, her mother is impressed by their “scenic” home. “You really have landed on your feet, my child,” she says to a proud Hedwig. But when the emanating sounds and smells become apparent to Hedwig’s mother, she reacts in a way that shocks Hedwig. 

In a film predicated on dissonance, the Höss’ persistent tidying up looms large. Whenever Rudolf takes off his boots, there is a Jewish prisoner there to clean them. When soot from the camp touches the river, Rudolf’s kids are scrubbed down with scalding hot water. When Rudolf has affairs, he washes his privates in a slop sink before returning to his wife’s bedroom. Weeds are pulled and human ashes are used to replenish. Every misdeed by the Höss family functions on this cycle of obfuscation. Composer Mica Levi ’s foreboding score, which can be guttural and dirty in infrared scenes, wherein a girl picks up food from the mud, participates in the dichotomy of polishing and revealing. The use of the color white—new sheets, sleek suits, and sterile office walls—depends upon this blurring. Even the language, the way everyone speaks about death in mechanical terms and technicalities, works to wash over the truth. If you’re always talking in circles about your crimes, isn’t it easier to continue performing them in a straight line? 

As much as Glazer’s film is about a specific moment in time, it’s equally concerned with how history records tragedy. Consider when Rudolf is transferred from Auschwitz to Oranienburg; Hedwig wants to stay in the dream house, in the reality she’s crafted for herself. Rudolf on the other hand, for the first time, openly speaks on the phone to his wife about murder without softening the language. Her reaction is grim; his words barely register. “It’s in the middle of the night and I need to be in bed,” she disturbingly replies. He hangs up on her, leaves the office and descends the stairs. While walking down the steps, he vomits several times until he comes to a barely lit hallway. Editor Paul Watts makes a narrative-breaking cut to present-day Auschwitz. It’s being cleaned—swept, mopped, and vacuumed—for visitors to witness the artifacts (shoes and luggage) now without owners. 

This juxtaposition allows for the two results of sanitization to be at play. For much of the film, viewers see how sanitization can be used to erase. Here, Glazer gives us a glimpse of how it can also be used to maintain. Because how we remember history, how we make note of current events—through propaganda, photography, video, and the internet—is a constant interplay between the truth as it exists and as it has been edited. The fact that "The Zone of Interest" arrives now, as world powers manipulate the narrative to sanitize their crimes, makes Glazer's images all the more chilling. Glazer’s intermingling of the now and the then, appearance versus truth, life and annihilation are rendered into unignorable magnitude.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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The Zone of Interest (2023)

Rated PG-13

105 minutes

Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss

Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss

Medusa Knopf as Elfriede

Daniel Holzberg as Gerhard Maurer

Ralph Herforth as Oswald Pohl

Maximilian Beck as Schwarzer

Sascha Maaz as Arthur Liebehenschel

Wolfgang Lampl as Hans Burger

• Jonathan Glazer
• Martin Amis

Original Music Composer

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‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: The Holocaust, Reduced to Background Noise

Jonathan Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

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‘The Zone of Interest’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director jonathan glazer narrates a sequence in this holocaust drama that takes place in the home of the lead characters..

“Hello, my name is Jonathan Glazer, and I’m the writer and director of the ‘Zone of Interest.’ So we open the sequence on a prisoner gardener, one of whose duties is to clean Rudolf Höss, the commandant’s boots. So everything you’re going to see in this scene was shot simultaneously with 10 cameras. We’re watching Hedwig Höss here with her friends having — it’s a typical weekday morning in the Höss house. The cameras just shot those women in the kitchen, is running simultaneously with the cameras in here shooting this girl. And she is a character called Aniela, who was real and lived and worked in the Höss house as a domestic servant, like so many of the local Polish girls worked in SS houses for them and their families. I’m following her in this sequence rather than the main characters, because it’s really one of the only times in the film where we can see, and connect, and spend time with, essentially, a victim of these atrocities. She’s not a Jewish girl. She’s a local Polish girl. As long as she keeps her head down and gets on with her work, she’ll be safe. So that’s what you see here, really. My direction to her, I remember, was to be invisible. That’s what she had to do, and to do everything as if her life depended on it. So every action is so carefully considered here. She’s really fantastic. The purpose of shooting — using all these cameras simultaneously was because I really didn’t want to have the artificial construction of a conventional film to tell this story — rather, to view them anthropologically, as if we were a fly on the wall, really, and just watch how they behaved and how they interacted, and not get caught up in the sort of screen psychologies that one does when one uses close-ups, and film lighting, and so on. Everything you see was — there’s no film lighting at all. It’s all natural light. No film lights are used in the film, and it’s all shot simultaneously. And the effect as well, I think, puts the viewer in the same time as the actors. So we are kind of locked in a sort of present-tense atmosphere, as if this thing was really happening. There’s nothing to process in the way that we normally process films. It’s a sort of Big Brother effect, really. And what she’s doing is she is obviously collecting the boots of the commandant. He’s in a meeting. He’s come back from the camps with blood on them, and she’s letting him know that they’re ready. These guys in this scene are two senior engineers from a crematorium firm called Topf & Sons, who built and supplied crematorium to the various concentration camps.” - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] “The tone of this scene really is as if they’re selling air conditioning units. Because to them, effectively, that’s as much as human life mattered to them. In fact, they refer to them as pieces in this scene, not as human beings. And the map that he’s pointing to here was called the Ring Furnace, which was the latest design. They never got to build, but that was the latest design in crematorium technology. And he is hopeful that Rudolf Höss is going to buy it.” - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

By Manohla Dargis

What is the point of “The Zone of Interest”? I’ve seen Jonathan Glazer’s movie twice, and each time I’ve returned to this question, something that I rarely feel compelled to ask. Movies exist because someone needs or wants to make art, tell a story, drive home a point, defend a cause, expose a wrong or simply make money. All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

Written and directed by Glazer, the movie is loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis with the same title. Heavily researched — Amis lists numerous resources in the emotional afterword — the book is narrated by three men, including a fictionalized character based on Rudolf Höss, the S.S. commandant who for several years ran Auschwitz. There, he oversaw a factory of torture and death in which, per the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, an estimated 1.1 million men, women and children were murdered, the vast majority Jews.

In adapting the novel, Glazer has jettisoned much of Amis’s novel, most of its characters, plotlines and inventive, at times near-hysteric, language and tone. What Glazer has retained is the novel’s intimate juxtaposition between the horrors of the extermination camp and the everyday lives of its non-inmate characters. Unlike Amis, however, who routinely invokes and at times describes the barbarism inside the camp — with its “daily berm of corpses,” as he writes — Glazer significantly and pointedly keeps these horrors at an oblique remove.

Instead, Glazer focuses on the day-to-day routine of the camp’s commandant and his family, using their real names. Together with their five children and a smattering of servants, Rudolf and Hedwig Höss — played by the relatively undemonstrative Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller — live in a nondescript, somewhat austere, predictably orderly multistory house. There’s a spacious garden with a small wading pool, beehives, a sprawling greenhouse and beds of flowers tended by camp prisoners. A tall wall topped with barbed wire borders the garden; through the wire, the tops of numerous death camp buildings dot the view.

The proximity of their home and these buildings is a jolt, and based on fact. The real Höss family, like their fictional counterparts, lived in the Auschwitz complex, a swath some 15 square miles in size that housed different camps in an area called the Interessengebiet or “interest zone.” The house was tucked near a corner of the oldest camp, Auschwitz I, which had prisoner barracks, gallows, a gas chamber and crematory. After Höss was arrested in 1946, he wrote that “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.” The children ran free and his wife had “her flower paradise.” He was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947, not far from where the family had lived.

The time frame in Glazer’s adaptation is vague, though primarily seems to take place in 1943 before the real Höss was transferred to another camp. The movie opens on a black screen accompanied by some music, a foreboding overture that gives way to a pacific scene at a river with a group of people in bathing suits. Eventually, they dress and motor off. Much of the rest of the movie takes place at the Höss family home, where Glazer’s carefully framed, often fixed cameras record the children playing while the parents chat and sometimes argue. You see Rudolf going off to work in the camp while Hedwig oversees the house. At one point, you also watch a prisoner quietly spreading ash on the garden as a soil amendment.

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• Entertainment
• <i>The Zone of Interest</i> Is a Breath-Stopping, Hauntingly Original Holocaust Drama

The Zone of Interest Is a Breath-Stopping, Hauntingly Original Holocaust Drama

T here are movies that confirm your place in the world, pictures that let you know you’re on the right track, capable of resolving any puzzle put before you. And then there are those that make you feel like the tiniest speck in the cosmos, a sentient but tentative being whose learning has just begun. Jonathan Glazer’s breath-stopping picture The Zone of Interest —playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival—is the latter kind. Glazer hasn’t made a feature in 10 years. His last was 2013’s Under the Skin , one of the most unnervingly poetic horror films of its decade, and perhaps any. The Zone of Interest is also a horror film, but a very different kind. It’s a movie about the most haunting atrocities of the Holocaust . It’s also a movie about marital companionship, about wanting the best for your children, about following the rules and working hard and feeling that you truly deserve the best in life. It’s about all the things that most people in the world want, entwined with the unspeakable.

At the movie’s center is a dream house built on nightmares. The house belongs to a family—the movie’s opening shows this little group and some family friends, in placid wide shot, lounging by a stream flanked by lush greenery, laughing, talking, drying their pale, damp skin after a swim. Though we can’t get a close look at them, we can see how utterly secure they are in their happiness, as if the sun above had been created just to shine down on them.

The head of this robust little family is Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) whose hard work and loyalty have earned him rich rewards: he’s the commandant of Auschwitz , and he and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) have been granted a fine parcel of land adjacent to the camp. They’ve got an austerely elegant house that meets all their needs, surrounded by a garden of bright flowers for their children to play in. Hedwig proudly shows off the grounds to her visiting mother, waving at the not-quite-high-enough brick partition that separates the property from the camp. “The Jews are over the wall,” she says, as if relaying an inconvenient but not particularly troublesome fact. “We planted more vines at the back to grow and cover it.”

Read more: Ken Burns on His New Documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust

Watching The Zone of Interest, you can see why Glazer puts so much space between one picture and the next. His filmmaking style is lapidary, yet his movies, particularly Under the Skin and this one, never feel fussed-over. Assured and precise, they’re the type of movies that carve their own space—there is nothing else like them. Glazer has no interest in showing us atrocities. The Zone of Interest is possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way. The camera watches, mouselike and still, as this little family goes about their daily business, the older kids skipping off to school, Hedwig bustling around the house. Their dialogue is muted, almost as if we shouldn’t be hearing it. Most of it is so mundane we might wonder why we’re eavesdropping, but every so often we pick up a detail that meshes with historical details we know, as when Höss and a colleague discuss a design for a new, improved crematorium, nodding approvingly as they outline its ease of use: “Burn, cool, unload, reload.”

Everything in the Hösses’ house, including their clothing, looks new and fresh. The Zone of Interest doesn’t have that muted, vaguely lived-in look that so many period dramas do, as if everything has been softened by the mists of time. In this movie, we’re living in the now. Höss stands in his garden as a building in the near distance—clearly a crematorium—shoots soft flames into the sky, so offhandedly they look like orange smudges. Sound carries, as if on a zephyr, from the camp to the garden: children and infants crying, beseeching cries of women, gunshots. These are just sounds in the distance, and if they’re startlingly immediate to us, the family doesn’t hear them.

Those problems are all far away, and no concern of theirs. Sometimes we’ll get a glimpse of an image—Höss blowing his nose in the sink, his snot mixed with soot, tiny flecks of human remains; one of the children pawing through his small treasure trove of gold teeth—but Glazer and his cinematographer Lukasz Zal linger on nothing. These miniature flashes of horror show that the evil perpetrated outside is following this family inside, though they’re oblivious to its vibrations—except, maybe, for one of the younger Hösses, a daughter, who appears to be having trouble sleeping, or is perhaps traveling in her sleep. (At one point, she mutters something drowsily to her father about “handing out sugar.”) Twice in the film the action shifts from the Hösses’ world to another one, rendered in a black-and-white negative image, of a little girl picking her way around mounds of dirt. Sometimes she’s nestling small white objects into their soft contours; other times she’s collecting bits of something from these inky masses. These are images with a meaning beyond words, half-chilling, half-comforting.

Glazer adapted The Zone of Interest from a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, who died on May 19, just a day after the movie’s Cannes premiere. He has taken some liberties with the novel, changing its fictionalized characters into people who existed in real life. (German SS Officer Rudolf Höss was Auschwitz’s longest-serving commandant, and was hanged for war crimes in 1947.) And, as he did for Under the Skin, Glazer has enlisted singer, songwriter and composer Mica Levi to furnish a spare score that challenges all we know about movie music. Glazer floats Levi’s hypnotic, droning soundshapes atop the movie’s images; sometimes they’re punctured by shouts or cries that we can can barely hear. And the movie closes with a shardlike piece of music—if you could call it that, and we will—that seems drawn from Hell itself, a blend of stylized howls and shrieks that start out soft and ultimately whirl out like a cyclone. It’s the sound of something you can’t quite put your finger on, and it follows you long after you’ve left the film behind. It’s a fallacy to think we can put history behind us.

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‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: Jonathan Glazer’s Profoundly Chilling Dramatic Portrait of a Nazi Family Living Right Next Door to Auschwitz

The director of "Under the Skin" creates a visionary look at life rooted in the evil of denial.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Of the thousands of dramatic feature films that deal with the subject of the Holocaust, few have evoked — or have even tried to — the experience of what went on inside the concentration camps. That’s understandable; the horror of that experience is forbidding and in some ways unimaginable. But there’s a small group of movies, like “Schindler’s List” and “Son of Saul” and “The Grey Zone,” that have met that horror head-on, and in an indelible way. To that list we can now add Jonathan Glazer ’s “ The Zone of Interest .”

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Höss, as we learn, is not just somebody who works at the camp. He’s the commandant — the man who not only runs Auschwitz but was instrumental in designing and implementing the machinery of mass death there, which was then exported to other Nazi concentration camps. All of this is historically based. “The Zone of Interest,” which was shot in Auschwitz and is loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, deals with the true-life figure of Rudolf Höss and his family. Glazer, however, doesn’t dramatize the book in a conventional way. He gives us extended scenes — static long takes, really — in which we observe the characters going about their lives as if we were watching them on a surveillance camera wielded by Stanley Kubrick. Much of what transpires is domestic and banal: eating meals, reading bedtime stories, sitting in the garden. The Höss family enjoy a pampered existence supported by a team of housekeepers, and their home has an aura of farmhouse comfort.

This, though, is a farmhouse located next door to a charnel house. Yet no one talks about it, references it, or maybe even thinks about it. That’s why everything in the movie is suffused with creepiness. That said, what’s going on at the camp isn’t quite invisible. We can see the rows and rows of stone barracks jutting up over the wall. More than that, we hear sounds in the distance — the muffled pop-popping of occasional gun shots, the blurry din of prisoners wailing in fear, the hoarse shouting of a German soldier and, underneath it all, a quiet roar that never goes away. It’s the sound of the fire from the ovens, which we can see in the distance as well, as flame and smoke belch out of the towering Auschwitz chimney. It’s all right there, but it’s happening … over there . Across the wall. Out of sight, out of mind. Watching “The Zone of Interest,” you feel the full meaning of the term “concentration” camp. All the murder and death has been squeezed away from the world, hidden and compressed.

The whole conceptual design of “The Zone of Interest” is fantastically provocative. Staring at the Höss family as they go about their business, I think we react in two simultaneous ways. We perceive the horror that they don’t, which gives us a queasy shudder. At the same time, there’s a way that the extremity of their denial — they’re in their middle-class bubble, almost like a suburban American family from the ’50s — exerts a kind of metaphorical overlap with aspects of our own experience. I’m not saying in any way that we’re “like Nazis,” but that we, too, live with elements of denial: about the terror and atrocity going on in the rest of the world, about injustice that might be happening close to our own backyard. Then too, Rudolf Höss is not in denial — he’s a monster who behaves like an ordinary citizen. The scene where he hears and approves an engineer’s plans for a newly efficient crematorium is beyond sickening.   

That threat gives the movie a dramatic momentum it very much needs. Höss learns that the regime is planning to replace him with a new commandant; he is set to be transferred. He has been at the job for nearly four years, and it’s time to rotate. But what will this do to his family’s lifestyle? He dreads telling Hedwig, and when he does her reaction indicates that she may love that lifestyle more than she does him. (He, meanwhile, seems to love his horse more than he does Hedwig.) Rudolf, of course, plays the part of the good soldier (he’s a Nazi, after all), but an element of the film’s darkly acerbic design it its portrayal of the Nazi mind-set as a corporate mentality. Höss is being replaced like some mid-level executive. And Hedwig, in her way, is every bit as married to the corporation.

Jonathan Glazer has had a career of singular idiosyncrasy that I’ve been notoriously impatient with. He started off in music video and, 23 years ago, directed his first feature, “Sexy Beast” (2000), which may be one of the greatest gangster movies ever made. But that was followed by the maddeningly opaque “Birth” (2004) and then “Under the Skin” (2013), a sci-fi parable starring Scarlett Johansson as an otherworldly predator that became a critical darling, though it was one I couldn’t sign on for. After a promising start, the movie, to me, became hazy and pretentious. I’ve been waiting, on some level, for Glazer to return to the accessibility of “Sexy Beast,” but “The Zone of Interest” is very much a work by Glazer the heady conceptual poet — and I have to say, it made me a believer. His staging of the film is brilliant. He makes that concentration camp (even though we only enter it once) a place real enough to haunt your dreams.

Christian Friedel plays Höss as a man who has made himself all surface, and that’s why he can do what he does. At a board meeting of Nazi officers, we hear about the plan to step up the Final Solution with the transport of 700,000 Jews out of Hungary. The film’s presentation of this is so matter-of-fact that it scalds us. And Höss turns out to be such a good Nazi that he wins the corporate battle he’s fighting. He gets to return to his job, because his replacement wasn’t deemed up to the task; maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it. But there’s a scene, near the end (it’s inspired by the ending of the documentary “The Act of Killing”), when Höss is walking down a stairway, and we glimpse, for just a moment, everything he’s carrying around inside. What the film shows us, at last, is the humanity of evil.   

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition), May 19, 2023. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: An A24 release of an Extreme Emotions, Film4, House Productions production. Producers: James Wilson, Ewa Puszcyńska. Executive producers: Reno Antoniades, Len Blavatnik, Danny Cohen, Tessa Ross, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek, David Kimbangi.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Jonathan Glazer. Camera: Lukasz Żal. Editor: Paul Watts. Music: Mica Levi.
• With: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Medusa Knopf, Daniel Holzberg, Sascha Maaz, Max Beck, Wolfgang Lampl, Ralph Herforth, Freya Kreutzkam.

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• What Is Cinema?

The Zone of Interest Is a Bold, Terrifying Vision of the Holocaust

The British writer-director  Jonathan Glazer begins his new film,  The Zone of Interest , with a howling void.  Mica Levi ’s keening, groaning score plays over a black screen for far longer than is comfortable. It feels as if we are descending to somewhere, quite possibly hell.

In many ways, we are. The film, which is quite loosely based on the Martin Amis novel and which premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, is set at Auschwitz. Or just outside it, at the home of the camp’s longest serving commandant, Rudolf Höss, and in the surrounding countryside. The dark of the film’s opening suddenly gives way to brightness and color: a family picnic by a lazy river. We then travel to the house, where Höss’s wife, Hedwig, an avid gardener, has overseen the planting of a lovely array of flowers and produce. The Hösses and their five happy children are living the dream of the Reich, having expanded east into Poland and enjoying a bucolic plenty. 

Rudolf is also overseeing the extermination of millions of Jewish people, just past the garden walls. The film only ventures into the camp for one brief shot. Otherwise, we are given only suggestions of the horror: guard dogs barking, occasional gunshots, the roar of a chimney which can be seen looming in the distance, belching fire and smoke and ash as the bodies of murdered prisoners are burned. In the foreground, things are sunny and domestic, the family dog happily chasing after the Hösses as they celebrate Rudolf’s birthday, host Hedwig’s mother for a mostly pleasant visit, cavort with another Nazi family in the swimming pool. Ash is scooped away by prison laborers while the Polish maids scurry around the house with a frightened stiffness.

Glazer is, of course, confronting Hannah Arendt’s observation of the banality of evil, a term coined in her report on the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s idea has been explored in art many times over the years, but Glazer’s chilling manifestation of it is perhaps especially striking. The director, whose last film was 2013’s  Under the Skin , is well-loved for his formal daring. In  Zone of Interest , he indeed delivers on that front. Glazer occasionally turns the screen monochrome as another of Levi’s composition grinds and yells; he shoots a pair of scenes in ghostly black-and-white night vision; and, in one stunning sequence, he zooms into the future to show an entirely different sort of banality. 

But perhaps his nerviest choice is to play so much of the film straight, calmly filmed and full of the petty concerns of contented family life. One could argue, I suppose, that Glazer makes his point early and then keeps hitting the same note. To my mind, though, there is something vital in the long immersion; to be steeped so thoroughly in the everyday life of a mass murderer and his nattering family is to remember, quite crucially, that not all actors in the Final Solution were raving lunatics like their Führer. There is sanity here, at least the outward impression of it, which proves far more rattling than a more articulated, performative villainy might have. 

Rudolf is played by  Christian Friedel as a doting husband and father, maybe a bit of a workaholic but ultimately devoted to his loved ones.  Sandra Hüller ’s Hedwig is the more forceful, outspoken partner, but really only when it comes to personal concerns like an Italian vacation or Rudolf’s impending transfer away from Auschwitz. Once or twice, though, we witness blurts of the cruelty within them: Hedwig blithely threatening a maid, Rudolf making a joke about gas chambers.

Their hideous indifference is apparent throughout, which may be where  Zone of Interest finds its timeliness. How easy it seems to have been for these “normal” people to follow bigoted and violent rhetoric to its end, to accept and abet the happenings across the wall as simply the realization of a better, more productive, purer nation. Glazer is not one to traffic in cheap political allegory, but the relevance of his film is clear. As fascist impulses are increasingly indulged and supported around the globe, and ignored by those nominally in opposition to them, how far away are many of our contemporaries from the Hösses’ garden?

That worry is often dismissed as hyperbolic doomsaying, or a troubling trend that’s merely isolated, with little mainstream traction. Some people in Hungary, or Turkey, or Florida may feel differently, though.  The Zone of Interest seems in heavy dialogue with a fear it sees as entirely legitimate; the film is a bracingly modern evocation of history, sans sentiment but screaming with fury and alarm as it attunes its ears to the low rumble of a coming repetition. 

This is Glazer’s most urgent, topical film to date, though it’s still stylish in his signature way. There may be some queasiness in appreciating the film’s technical acumen when it is making such dreadful allusions. But Glazer’s prowess is impossible to deny.  Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time. 

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Chilling 'Zone of Interest' imagines life next door to a death camp

Justin Chang

Sandra Hüller plays a mother who lives next door to Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest. A24 hide caption

Sandra Hüller plays a mother who lives next door to Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest.

The Zone of Interest begins on a lovely afternoon somewhere in the Polish countryside. A husband and wife are enjoying a picnic on the banks of a river with their five children; they eat lunch and then splash around in the sunshine. It all looks so peaceful, so inviting. But something seems strangely amiss once the family returns home.

They live in a beautiful villa with an enormous garden, a greenhouse and a small swimming pool. But before long, odd details intrude into the frame, like the long concrete wall, edged with barbed wire, and the ominous-looking buildings behind it. And almost every scene is underscored by a low, unceasing metallic drone, which sometimes mixes with the sounds of human screams, dog barks and gunshots.

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It's 1943, and this family lives next door to Auschwitz . The husband, played by a chillingly calm Christian Friedel, is the camp commandant Rudolf Höss, who's remembered now as the man who made Auschwitz the single most efficient killing machine during the Holocaust.

But director Jonathan Glazer never brings us inside the camp or depicts any of the atrocities we're used to seeing in movies about the subject. Instead, he grounds his story in the quotidian rhythms of the Hösses' life, observing them over several months as they go about their routine while a massive machinery of death grinds away next door.

In the mornings, Rudolf rides a horse from his yard up to the gates of Auschwitz — the world's shortest, ghastliest commute. His wife, Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller (from Anatomy of a Fall ), might sip coffee with her friends. At one point, she slips into her bedroom to try on a fur coat; it takes a beat to realize that the coat was taken from a Jewish woman on her way to the gas chambers.

Ken Burns connects the past and the present in 'The U.S. and the Holocaust'

We see their children go off to school or play in the garden, and some of their more violent roughhousing suggests they know what's going on around them. At night, the fiery smoke from the crematorium chimneys sends a hazy orange light into the bedroom windows; this is a movie that makes you wonder, quite literally, how these people managed to sleep at night.

Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, shot the movie on location near the camp, in a meticulous replica of the Hösses' real house. They used tiny cameras that were so well hidden the actors couldn't see them; as a result, much of what we see has the eerie quality of surveillance footage, observing the characters from an almost clinical remove.

In its icy precision, Glazer's movie reminded me of the Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose films, like Caché and The White Ribbon , are often about the violence simmering beneath well-maintained domestic surfaces. It also plays like a companion-piece to Glazer's brilliant 2013 sci-fi thriller, Under the Skin , which was also, in its way, about the total absence of empathy.

Family Film Offers Glimpse Of 'Three Minutes In Poland' Before Holocaust

Mostly, though, The Zone of Interest brings to mind Hannah Arendt 's famous line about "the banality of evil," which she coined while writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of Höss' Third Reich associates. In one plot turn drawn from real life, Rudolf is eventually transferred to a new post in Germany; Hedwig is furious and insists on staying at Auschwitz with the children, claiming, "This is the life we've always dreamed of" — a line that chills you to the bone. In these moments, the movie plays like a very, very dark comedy about marriage and striving: Look at what this couple is willing to do, the movie says, in their desire for the good life.

Here I should note that The Zone of Interest was loosely adapted from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis , which featured multiple subplots and characters, including a Jewish prisoner inside the camp. But Glazer has pared nearly all this away, to extraordinarily powerful effect. He's clearly thought a lot about the ethics of Holocaust representation, and he has no interest in staging or re-creating what we've already seen countless times before. What he leaves us with is a void, a sense of the terrible nothingness that the banality of evil has left behind.

• Martin Amis

‘The Zone of Interest’: Jonathan Glazer’s Chilling Holocaust Movie Is a Masterpiece

• By David Fear

Holocaust movies are now a genre. It makes one more than a little queasy to acknowledge this. We’re talking about art that seeks to recreate an atrocity of such devastating scale and magnitude; to imagine the unimaginable. You can say the phrase “Holocaust movie” and a number of images and scenarios, conventions and clichés immediately spring to mind. Some of these feature films have been extraordinary. Several have been borderline exploitative. A few have been outright offensive. German philosopher Theodor Adorno is often misquoted as saying, “There’s no poetry after Auschwitz”; his actual statement was that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” And while these films may collectively help us to never forget what happened, they’ve also risked making us insensitive to such horrors. Barbarism is reduced to Oscar-clip fodder.

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A filmmaker who transitioned from making groundbreaking, Hall-of-Fame music videos to tweaked genre deconstructions — you can technically dub Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), and Under the Skin (2013) as a gangster movie, a supernatural thriller, and an alien-invasion parable, though that doesn’t begin to do any of these sui generis works justice —  Glazer has perfected a sort of subzero-temp formalism that both attracts and repels viewers looking for familiar narrative toeholds. The stranger his approach, the more you tend to be dazed and amazed by the way his high style pushes the storytelling into exhilaratingly odd places. (We’ve still never been able to shake the sight of Scarlett Johansson’s extraterrestrial predator luring Scottish lads into pitch-black feeding tarpits in Under the Skin. )

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But it also wants to warn us that: This was not the result of aliens, or the supernatural, or some primitive Neanderthals. This was the result of human beings determined to kill other human beings. And while The Zone of Interest has no interest in making you feel empathy for the Hösses — it has none for them, nor should it — the film demands you recognize the common ground of “us,” rather than “them.” Look at the similarities rather the differences, it asks, and the fact that it does this without disrespecting the unfathomable tragedy of it all is what makes this an entirely different, entirely profound take. Some have said that Glazer’s film is a reinvention of the Holocaust movie, but that’s glibly giving this masterpiece short shrift. It’s a work that forces you to reexamine how we’ve processed this chapter of history and restores a proper sense of ungraspable horror.

Without giving away the shock of the ending, there’s a flash-forward that presents us with the legacy of what we’ve witnessed, before fading out on Höss vomiting and choking on the history of the 20th century’s great moral failure. Unlike most such dramas, it does not want you to leave thinking of the past. It needs you to pay very close attention to the present.

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‘the zone of interest’ review: jonathan glazer’s audacious film is a bone-chilling holocaust drama like no other.

Loosely adapted from the Martin Amis novel, the Brit director’s fourth feature focuses on a camp commandant’s family living their bucolic dream life just over the wall from Auschwitz.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

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Adapting Martin Amis’ 2014 novel by radically pruning and reshaping the entire plot and narrowing its gaze to just one of the three narrators, Glazer transforms the book’s fictionalized protagonist into the real-life SS officer he was inspired by, Rudolf Höss. The longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Höss was a leading force in perfecting the techniques of mass extermination implemented during the acceleration of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

The other key element retained is the setting that gives both book and film their title. The area in question is the roughly 25 square miles immediately surrounding Auschwitz in western Poland.

The euphemistic nature of the term fits the themes of compartmentalization and denial in Glazer’s film, explored through the bucolic existence of Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, the revelation from Toni Erdmann ) and their five children just over the wall from the camp, within hearing distance of where unspeakable atrocities are being committed. That juxtaposition seems the very essence of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” perfectly captured in the cast’s naturalistic performances.

Working with Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who shot Pawel Pawlikowski’s beautiful black-and-white companion pieces Ida and Cold War , Glazer embedded remotely operated cameras in production designer Chris Oddy’s reconstruction of the Höss residence. They shot simultaneously on up to 10 cameras in different rooms using no film lights and allowing the actors to move unobstructed.

This dovetails with the visual scheme outside in the extensive garden — Hedwig’s pride and joy with its greenhouse, fruit trees and vegetable patches, all of it carefully landscaped according to historical records. The film unfolds predominantly in fixed wide shots under natural light, establishing a detached observational style that somehow makes its scrutiny more chilling.

Likewise, the unsettling use of Mica Levi’s music, which follows the experimental composer’s nerve-shredding work on Under the Skin in fusing score with ambient sound, thinking about film music in boundary-pushing new ways. The movie’s prologue and coda feature a few minutes of black screen, broken only by the words of the title at the start and accompanied by Levi’s score, murky and malevolent at first, then exploding into a terrifying cacophony at the end. The film is punctuated intermittently by violent blasts of horns that sound like the wounded cries of other-worldly animals.  

But rather than normalizing the family’s apparent imperviousness to the atrocities, the choice to remain entirely on the civilian side of the wall makes the nightmare more gut-wrenching. What’s unseen often is more frightening. Even the fact that scarcely a word of Hitlerian rhetoric is spoken makes the cold reality of it all hit harder.

Glazer’s script moves adroitly between ordinary snapshots of Höss family domesticity — Hedwig laughing with other officers’ wives around the kitchen table about her unpaid Jewish housemaids as if they aren’t there; Rudolf routinely closing and locking each door at night; one of their young sons playing alone in his room, not even flinching at the noise of a prisoner being shot — and the patriarch’s professional responsibilities, such as an informal business meeting in which he and his colleagues discuss optimal methods for high-volume incineration.

Only in rare instances does the reality of the death camp intrude forcefully on their consciousness, notably during an afternoon Rudolf spends fishing and canoeing on the river with his kids. Aghast to realize the water’s surface is sprinkled with the ash of burned bodies, he hurries the children inside to be scrubbed clean.

The conflict that ruptures the family’s contentment comes when Rudolf gets word that he’s being transferred to head office, near Berlin, a move that he protests to no avail. Hedwig is enraged that he waits to tell her until any hope of reversing the decision is gone, reminding him that living away from the city with space to breathe has been their dream since they were 17. Her anger spills out during a momentary annoyance with a maid, spitting out that she could have her husband sprinkle the woman’s ashes in a field.

In the high-level meetings that follow, Rudolf spearheads procedure for handling a massive influx of Hungarian Jews, as if he were managing any ordinary factory shipment. Reporting the news of Himmler’s approval to Hedwig later, he says, “I’m pleased as Punch!” These glimpses of standard bureaucracy and infrastructure being applied without a flicker of emotion to genocidal extermination make your blood run cold.

Glazer saves the sole exposure to what’s beyond the wall in Auschwitz for last, with a time shift and a brief detour into documentary that recalls the unblinking gaze of Alain Resnais’ landmark 1956 short film, Night and Fog . The sickening blunt impact is heightened by the quotidian nature of everything going on around what we’re seeing, and the eruption of Levi’s music that follows is like an alarm going off, reminding us to remain alert to the cyclical loops of history.

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The Zone of Interest review: A hellish, daring spin on more traditional Holocaust movies

Jonathan glazer’s film – which has been nominated for five oscars, including best picture – is set on the literal fringes of auschwitz, with seemingly idyllic images of family life bordering the horror on the other side of the fence, article bookmarked.

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The Zone of Interest – which has been nominated for five Oscars , including Best Picture – issues a warning from just outside the walls of Auschwitz, spreading its soul-sickness across each frame. It studies the domestic life of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the real-life commandant at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where an estimated 1.1 million people – 960,000 of them Jewish – were murdered. He lived at that time, with his family, in a corner of Auschwitz I, where a gas chamber and a crematorium were built.

Laundry is hung out to dry in the sun. A boy shares his first kiss around the back of the house. Hoss walks down to the nearby river to fish. At first glance, these images may seem innocent – idyllic, even. But we must bear witness to their details and testify to their significance: the rail-thin bodies in muddied uniforms, silently delivering the week’s groceries; the barbed wire that trims every exterior wall; the smoke issued from a train that skims across the top of the screen. Hoss’s wife, Hedwig ( Anatomy of a Fall ’s Sandra Huller ), leads her visiting mother around the property’s vegetable patch. A faint, anguished scream interrupts the flow of conversation. Hedwig pauses for a moment and then continues.

Taking loose inspiration from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis , director Jonathan Glazer demonstrates Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory at work. First conceived during the 1960 trial of Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer and one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, the term views the enactment of such unspeakable crimes through a lens of “sheer thoughtlessness” – that men like Eichmann and Hoss hid their evil beneath ordinary turns of phrase, mindless action, and quotidian bureaucracy.

And it is unavoidable, now, that Arendt’s words reflect back to us. “This is not a film about the past,” the director has said. “It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims." When Hoss is ordered to relocate to Berlin, his wife becomes inconsolable. She refuses to leave the house she’s transformed into her own fortress of delusion. We see uniformed officers, these machines of death, standing at the gates. But Hoss will ensure his boots are washed of blood before he steps across the threshold.

In the kitchen, the wives howl, gossiping about the clothes they stole off Jewish victims. But they will not utter a word about the fires they see burn at night. Huller’s intelligently pitched performance allows Hedwig’s mock nonchalance to crumble for a moment when she tells the Jewish woman who works in her home that she could “have my husband spread your ashes” across the countryside.

It’s a tidy home, rendered uncanny and hostile by Łukasz Żal’s cinematography. In Glazer’s last film, 2013’s Under the Skin , the director relied on hidden cameras to track an extraterrestrial Scarlett Johansson’s journey across Glasgow. He does the same here, with 10 fixed cameras dotted around the house, controlled via remote. An extended title sequence provides a kind of sensory deprivation. A darkened screen gives way to the hellish sirens of Mica Levi’s score, before we awaken, powerless to disrupt Hoss’s hermetic reality. At the very end, Glazer chooses to flash forward, his intentions made concrete – the evils of today will leave their own scars on history.

Dir: Jonathan Glazer. Starring: Christian Friedel, Sandra Huller, Ralph Herforth, Daniel Holzberg, Sascha Maaz, Freya Kreutzkam, Imogen Kogge, Johann Karthaus, Lilli Falk. 12A, 105 minutes.

‘The Zone of Interest’ is in cinemas from 2 February

This article was amended on 2 February 2024. It originally referred to Auschwitz as a Polish concentration camp, but the camp was set up and run by Nazi Germany on occupied land.

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Review: ‘The Zone of Interest,’ a masterpiece set next door to Auschwitz, gets under the skin

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What does a Nazi do on his day off? Things any of us might do, especially on a sunny afternoon: He takes the family out for a countryside picnic, watching them eat, play and splash in a river and then hiking with them back to the car. Along the way, a baby cries and squirms; her older siblings bicker on the drive home. And what a home it is, a stately villa with many rooms and a gated garden where flowers, fruits and vegetables grow in abundance. There’s also a greenhouse, a swimming pool and a long concrete wall, edged with barbed wire, that only partially obstructs the family’s view of the concentration camp next door.

“The Zone of Interest,” the brilliantly disquieting new movie from the English writer-director Jonathan Glazer, never brings us over that camp wall. It’s a horror film that keeps its horrors rigorously hidden from view. But while restrained in form and implications, “Zone” is never coy, and is surprisingly quick to disgorge its secrets. The camp is Auschwitz. The Nazi is Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), the camp’s longest-serving commandant. Glazer, drawing very loose inspiration from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis , confines his narrative focus to the period between 1943 and 1944, and he grounds his spare story in the everyday rhythms and meticulously researched details of the Hösses’ family life.

The quality of dread that he sustains over an eerie, exactingly precise 106 minutes stems from our disturbing realization of just how quotidian that life is. Here is a house so well run that the business of mass murder happening a stone’s throw away has been thoroughly, almost imperceptibly routinized. There’s a darkly funny early shot of Rudolf riding a horse from his yard up to the gates of Auschwitz, completing the world’s shortest, ghastliest commute. When he later blows out the candles on his birthday cake, surrounded by his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, “Anatomy of a Fall” ), and their five children, you may not immediately notice the camp guard tower looming in the window behind him.

By this point, your mind may have already summoned the words “the banality of evil,” the immortal phrase that Hannah Arendt coined in the 1960s when writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of Höss’ Third Reich associates. The expression was much bandied about by critics ( myself included ) after “The Zone of Interest” premiered and won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. But not all banality is created equal — and not all evil is created equal, either. The specific achievement of this movie, recently named the best picture of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. , is to explore evil without glamorizing it, and to transmute the mundane into something quietly mesmerizing.

Working mostly inside a re-creation of the Hösses’ house built very close to the Auschwitz camp site (the meticulous production design is by Chris Oddy), Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal (“Ida,” “Cold War”), composed their shots and filmed their actors using multiple hidden cameras. Much of the resulting imagery has the unsettling intimacy of high-tech surveillance footage, a quality reinforced by Paul Watts’ editing, which sometimes tracks the characters’ movements so assiduously it’s as if the cuts were being activated by motion sensors. The guiding impulse seems to have been to purge every hint of warmth or subjectivity from the frame, and to subject the Hösses to a gaze as inhuman as their own.

With a chilly austerity worthy of Stanley Kubrick or Michael Haneke , Glazer turns a static shot into a booby trap and a daily activity into an indictment. When Hedwig slips into her bedroom to try on a new fur coat, it takes a beat to register that the garment’s owner has just been gassed and cremated. Groceries are wheelbarrowed to the front door by a deliveryman whose significance you don’t grasp until he turns his back, revealing the red prisoner stripe on his jacket. At night, one of the Höss children sits in bed poring over a stash of gold teeth, presumably a gift from Papa. Outside in the hall, his sister sits alone at a window, transfixed by the smoky orange glow she sees outside and the groaning, mechanized roar she hears.

What she hears, and what we hear, is of extraordinary significance. “The Zone of Interest” opens on a pitch-black screen and a blast of Mica Levi’s spare, demonically intense score ; we could be listening to Druidic chants in hell — chords of lush, operatic dread and terror that might seem disproportionate to the becalmed images that follow. But even as Levi’s orchestrations recede, an equally detail-rich music intrudes: bits of birdsong, echoing footfalls and, before long, dogs’ barks, human screams, crackling flames, whistling trains and the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Even in simple scenes of the Hösses at work or at play, this chilling aural undertow never ceases. As conceived by the sound designer Johnnie Burn , it’s so vividly enveloping that you might want to heighten its impact by closing your eyes.

Don’t, though. Part of what gives the movie its queasy fascination is that we’re not just observing its characters, but we’re observing what they observe and inevitably questioning what they know. Some though not all of the children seem sweetly oblivious. Their parents’ guilt is of course beyond doubt, and to say that they have turned a blind eye to their complicity, or are in a state of denial, is to extend them unconscionable charity. Hedwig, far from denying anything, seems to have long ago accepted the conditions of her family’s wealth and comfort, none of which are lost on her as she shows off her garden to her visiting mother and proudly proclaims herself the “Queen of Auschwitz.”

That garden is in some ways crucial to unlocking “The Zone of Interest.” Metaphors may have no place at a concentration camp, but it’s hard to look at this beautiful enclosed space and not see it, perversely, as the most despoiled of Edens. Here, in a short montage of intensely hued floral closeups, Glazer suggests an overpowering residue of death: the ashen remains that have descended on these flowers, seeped into the soil and contaminated the fruits and vegetables. Day after day, the Hösses are turning more and more into what they eat, what they breathe and who they kill. Meanwhile, under cover of darkness, an unidentified young girl bravely sneaks out of her own home at night and leaves apples along the road for the prisoners of Auschwitz to find. These moments, shot with thermal imaging cameras, resemble black-and-white photonegatives, as if to suggest just how alien an act of goodness and resistance has become.

The extremity of that formal choice can’t help but remind me of Glazer’s “Under the Skin” (2013), a bewitchingly creepy sci-fi thriller that was, in some ways, as radical a study in anti-empathy as this one. In that movie, an extraterrestrial being regards a screaming, abandoned human child with understandable indifference. The automatons in SS uniforms we see in “The Zone of Interest” have no such excuse. Here, a man sits stone-faced as he studies blueprints for a maximum-efficiency crematorium, one of many technical innovations that will make Höss one of the most prodigious mass murderers in history.

That we never see those murders — the bloodstains on Rudolf’s boots are as close as we get — renders Friedel’s performance all the more galvanizing in its restraint, a restraint that the camera echoes by keeping its distance from the actors, registering body language as much as expression. Rudolf enters every situation with a calmly appraising eye; he shows affection to his kids and seldom raises his voice. As the lady of the house, Hüller cuts a loathsome, terrifying figure: She’s a hausfrau Lady Macbeth, all inelegant vanity and hectoring manipulation. When Rudolf learns he’s being transferred to a new post in Oranienburg, Germany, potentially upending their idyllic existence, Hedwig screams and rants and sheds crocodile tears. “This is the life we’ve always dreamed of,” she protests, a claim whose utter horror sinks into your marrow.

From there, “The Zone of Interest” morphs into a kind of Third Reich boardroom thriller that plays, at times, like a pitch-black comedy about work-life balance. Are we meant to see ourselves reflected in the Hösses, hard-working souls who just want to live in their lovely house, throw fabulous parties and enjoy their home-grown produce? Are we meant to be implicated in our own indifference, our willful avoidance of the barbarism in our own backyards?

Yes and no, I suspect. The oft-stated purpose of movies about history, and about the Holocaust in particular, is to allow the past to speak to the present. But something about the unnerving intelligence of Glazer’s conception, the obsessive intensity with which he has excavated and re-enacted this chapter of history, resists the usual bromides about finding the universal in the specific.

When the real-life Höss was executed for his crimes in April 1947, the gallows was built just 100 meters from this once-cherished house, a domestic paradise that operated in the shadow of an inferno. Could he see his house from where he stood on the gallows, and if so, did it fill him with one final, bitter twinge of irony? The movie doesn’t say. His psychology is of minimal concern or insight, and his death falls outside this movie’s own temporal zone of interest. But the conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, “The Zone of Interest” leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.

'The Zone of Interest'

In German and Polish, with English subtitles Rating: PG-13, for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 15 at AMC Century City 15; Vista Theatre

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'The Zone of Interest' Review: Jonathan Glazer’s Haunting, Restrained Journey into Evil

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The Big Picture

• The Zone of Interest takes a unique approach to the Holocaust by focusing on the mundane lives of the Höss family, reminding us of the atrocities on the other side of the wall.
• Director Jonathan Glazer effectively builds a sense of terror without showing the actual events at Auschwitz, relying on the audience's familiarity with the story.
• Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller deliver unnerving performances, capturing the dread and acceptance of their savage characters.

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

Before we see a single frame of The Zone of Interest , from Sexy Beast and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer , we can feel the all-encompassing nature of evil. As the words “The Zone of Interest” appear on the screen, they’re soon enveloped in darkness, swirled away into the black , fading away into a warped nightmare and Mica Levi ’s haunting score. Prior to the film even beginning, Glazer throws us into the droning terror, preparing us for his idiosyncratic take on the Holocaust story.

The Zone of Interest

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.

When Glazer first shows us the Höss home, very little seems to be out of the ordinary . But this house shares a wall with Auschwitz, and while the Höss family seems idyllic at times, we’re always reminded of what is happening on the other side of that wall. On one side of that wall is an attempt at domestic normalcy, and on the other, some of the worst atrocities ever perpetuated in human history. Rudolf Höss ( The White Ribbon ’s Christian Friedel ) is the commandant of Auschwitz, and he and his wife Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ) have come from very little, and now have the home of their dreams, complete with several kids, and a handful of Jewish women that work within their house.

Glazer—who also wrote the script based very loosely on Martin Amis ’ book of the same name—makes the story of the Höss family intentionally mundane. Hedwig shows her mother her expansive garden, which we can see stretches the length of an entire building on the other side of the wall, while Rudolf’s job involves finding more efficient ways to get rid of hundreds of bodies a day. No matter what the Höss family does, the agony of the other side of that wall permeates the day-to-day .

'The Zone of Interest' Takes a Terrifying Approach to the Holocaust Film

Glazer makes the surprisingly effective choice to never show us what is actually occurring in Auschwitz , and frankly, we don’t need to see what countless other movies have shown us. Glazer knows that we have already seen that story, and as the viewer, we bring our experience with these stories to this film, which fills in the blanks that he doesn’t show us. The result is a choice that is more unnerving than the film could ever show us visually.

But The Zone of Interest always reminds us of what is going on in subtle and extremely overt ways. As we follow the Höss family, we constantly hear gunshots, each one likely taking yet another life. While the Höss home has come to ignore these inconveniences, every shot is a jolt to the audience. When they decide to have a garden party, complete with a buffet of food and a pool, we can see the smoke from the trains wafting overhead. Combined with Levi’s twisted, unsettling and sparsely used score, The Zone of Interest is an aural shock—even when the world might seem normal on the surface .

Yet even Glazer’s more overt mentions of what is happening are jarring in their own right . One particular shot shows several of Hedwig’s flowers, as we hear blood-curdling screams, until the screen turns entirely red, which ends with an unexpected cut back to reality—as if we’re getting just a small dose of the panic and fear that is happening mere feet away. Glazer’s approach in these grander moments is especially powerful near the end of the film, as Rudolf has what seems to be a moment of self-awareness akin to the ending of Joshua Oppenheimer ’s incredible documentary The Look of Silence , spliced together with a vision of what will happen to all his hard work.

In a way, Glazer’s approach to Amis’s The Zone of Interest is fairly similar to how he adapted Michel Faber ’s Under the Skin : paring the spirit of the story down to its bare essence and telling that story primarily through impactful visuals. In the way that Under the Skin dissected the science fiction story, Glazer tears apart what we know a Holocaust story to be , showing us that pure evil isn’t necessarily always big and imposing, but rather, can be fairly banal and every day—an even more important message for today’s evils.

In adapting the Martin Amis novel, Glazer boils this story down to the pure evil that emanated from that book , a darkness that seeped into every page and through every action of these characters. Glazer’s take is far more abstract than the Amis story, allowing us to feel that rising tension, without prioritizing narrative or character. Essentially, Glazer is giving us the same impact that Amis was able to, but without speaking about this evil too directly. We can sense the darkness around every family gathering, we can hear the roar of the atrocities, and the indirect camera that is more of a viewer than an actual participant is able to show the normalcy of this family, which only makes what we’re not seeing even more terrifying.

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller Are Unnerving in Their Characters' Mundane Lives

Even though Glazer is showing us the “normal” every day life of the Höss family, we still feel like some horror is just around the corner —literally and figuratively. This is largely because of the restrained performances by Friedel and Hüller, who go about their days aware of the impact they have on those around them and the power they wield. We’ve seen countless films about the Holocaust, and Glazer knows we’re bringing those experiences with us into The Zone of Interest . In not showing us what’s happening over the wall, we bring our past knowledge from other films into this story, and that makes the lack of knowing even more haunting and terrifying. We can hear the gunshots and the occasional screams, and we know what’s happening because we’ve already seen these horrors before. Even though we react at every reminder of what’s going on beyond the wall, the way that Hüller and Friedel are able to go about their business without even flinching shows us the evil within them that Glazer doesn’t have to present to us.

Friedel and Hüller are particularly excellent in presenting this idea, as they are able to present an air of dread even when they’re doing nothing directly monstrous. Simply their presence and acceptance of their situation makes them savage—they don’t have to oversell their clear nature. If anything, the clumsiest parts of The Zone of Interest come when Glazer has Rudolph and Hedwig directly telling the audience ideas we’ve already gathered through the context of the story , which ends up making them feel like Glazer hitting us over the head with things we already know. For example, when one of the Jewish women who works at the Höss household makes what seems like an honest mistake, Hedwig reminds that her husband could easily spread the poor woman’s ashes without nearly a thought. But considering that we’ve already seen the fear that these women live in as the Höss family servants, the potential of this type of scenario is already abundantly clear from the simple way they move around this family.

Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal ( Cold War , Ida ) shoot The Zone of Interest mostly in the day and with natural light , once again presenting this home as a halcyon of happiness, which makes the narrative itself even more distressing. In the day, it’s easy to hide, but at night, it’s impossible to avoid the flames constantly burning in the darkness. It’s in the night where Glazer gives us small glimmers of hope, using negative film to invert the story, and show us how even the tiniest—but still immensely dangerous—attempts to fight back against the oppressors never let the hope entirely die down.

The Zone of Interest , like Son of Saul or The White Ribbon before it, finds ways to continue telling these important stories, but to do so in a way that presents these narratives in a wholly unique fashion . Glazer’s latest fits within his distinct style, breaking down a genre and working with the skeleton that’s left over in order to get at the heart of what makes these stories so jarring.

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is a haunting look at the Holocaust, a stark use of visuals and sound to create an emotional experience rather than a narrative one.

• The Zone of Interest uses haunting sound and direction for an unnerving experience unlike any other look at the Holocaust.
• Jonathan Glazer's camera keeps the audience at a distance, but just close enough to feel the horror emanating from this camp.
• The film's conclusion is a stark reminder of evil's legacy, and a tremendous ending for a staggering story.

The Zone of Interest is now available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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The Zone Of Interest Review

02 Feb 2024

The Zone Of Interest

Clothes and trinkets from Jews, facing degradation and starvation, if not death, find their way to Rudolf Höss’ house. His wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tries on the spoils like she’s in Saks Fifth Avenue, slipping into a fur coat, twirling and posing in front of her bedroom mirror. Downstairs, Rudolf (Christian Friedel) conducts a work meeting, in which gas-chamber blueprints are pored over like designs for a new car, human incineration discussed in bland business tones. But what a magnificent house! Modernist by any era’s standards, it is beloved by the happy Höss family, despite the fact that it backs onto Auschwitz, literally — atop the garden wall is barbed wire, for it is also one of the camp’s walls (as it was in reality). A hulking watchtower is visible beyond it. A deathly chimney overlooks the Höss children’s paddling pool.

The family enjoy an idyllic life, swimming in a nearby lake, sunbathing in the long grass. In their bedroom at night, Hedwig and Rudolf natter and joke before sleep; otherwise, all is quiet. All except for the ever-present rumbling of the camp. The sound of whirring machinery. Grim bass hues that make you feel physically sick. In the daytime, inside the house, and outside in the splendid garden, the noise from over the wall is even worse. Orders are barked. Pain is heard. At one point, beautiful close-up shots of the garden’s lilacs and sunflowers are soundtracked by screams. But nobody who lives in this house cares. They’ve tuned all of that out, so meaningless is it to them. The frequent gunshots are not just ignored, they’re barely even registered.

So much more upsetting than can be described.

Jonathan Glazer’s unique film, which is so much more upsetting than can be described, is a study of what it’s like to have no moral conscience. By layering on all that sound as the Höss family get on with their days, with indifference to the incessant audible murder as they work and eat and laugh and bicker, Glazer humanises dehumanisation. Hedwig — in a superbly callous performance by Hüller — cares only about the house. Later, her mother comes to stay, and is given a tour of the garden by her proud daughter. There is some brief discussion of who’s on the other side of the wall. Could the Jewish woman Hedwig’s mother used to work for be there now? Probably. But it’s a quick conversation, swiftly forgotten as talk turns to cabbage, kale and pumpkins while they parade around the foliage, the camp looming over them. “Honestly,” says Mum, agog at the domestic paradise, “to have all this. You really have landed on your feet, my child.”

Save for one stark, low-angle look at Rudolf surveying Auschwitz, we don’t go into the camp at all. The point, and the power, is the everyday dismissal of what’s there. Glazer is steadfastly resistant to anything that might sensationalise the suffering. But we feel it, constantly. There’s an incredible shot of Hedwig’s mother in the middle of the night, peering through the bedroom window at the camp chimney fire that’s faintly reflected on the glass. It’s maybe a one-second shot, subtle and simple, and all the more startling because of it. Glazer doesn’t labour on it. Other than a couple of aesthetic departures in service of mood and poignancy, he doesn’t draw attention to himself, not permitting the filmmaking to get in the way (much of it was shot with hidden, or at least unobtrusive cameras, and directed remotely). Yes, The Zone Of Interest is about atrocity, but more importantly it is about the attitude towards it. Stylistically, there is a detachment, to match that of the perpetrators. And that’s what gets into your bones.

This is Glazer’s fourth film, following Sexy Beast , Birth and Under The Skin . He is an observer of the absurd, increasingly so, every time his approach more acute, and every time creating more distance. With each film he has become more refined and more restrained, to extraordinarily queasy effect here, not least because of an evil score by Mica Levi. The warped choral tones and unsettling drones are used economically. The end credits are accompanied by the sound of hell, a writhing, tortured sonic swamp. We’re left with that. It may never leave us.

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Movies | 10 03 2024

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‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust Anti-Drama Is a Chilling Look at the Banality of Evil

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. A24 releases the film in select theaters on Friday, December 15.

A narrative Holocaust drama that’s defined by its rigorous compartmentalization and steadfast refusal to show any hint of explicit violence, Jonathan Glazer’s profoundly chilling “The Zone of Interest” stands out for how formally the film splits the difference between the two opposite modes of its solemn genre — a genre that may now be impossible to consider without it. No Holocaust movie has ever been more committed to illustrating the banality of evil, and that’s because no Holocaust movie has ever been more hell-bent upon ignoring evil altogether. There is a literal concrete wall that separates Glazer’s characters from the horrors next door, and not once does his camera dare to peek over it for a better look. It doesn’t even express the faintest hint of that desire.

Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (“Toni Erdmann” star Sandra Hüller, seen here in an equally fearless performance of a very different stripe), and their five young children enjoy an idyllic picnic on the bank of the river that runs along their house. The sky is blue and the birds are chirping — as Kurt Vonnegut would insist they continue to do, even in the wake of a massacre. When the family retires to their large stucco villa (which is surrounded by a veritable forest of lilacs and ladybirds, and a swimming pool that has its own slide), the kids surprise Rudolf with a canoe for his birthday. 

The Aryan fantasy of it all isn’t subtle, but its most ominous details are easy to overlook in a film that refuses to pay them any special attention. It may be a few minutes before you begin to notice the barbed wire that’s coiled atop the far wall of Hedwig’s garden, or the smoke stacks that stick out into the skyline just beyond it. It will be a few minutes longer before an errant line of dialogue confirms that the Höss family lives on the border of history’s most notorious concentration camp, because Rudolf is the commandant of Auschwitz. 

Much less mindful of plot than the Martin Amis novel from which it’s been (very loosely) adapted, “The Zone of Interest” is a far cry from the kind of story we’ve been conditioned to expect from a premise like this. A desperate Jew never escapes into the Höss family house in order to impress their humanity upon Hedwig or her kids. Nobody has a sudden change of heart, or even experiences anything that might hope to provoke one. When Rudolf is reassigned to an office in Berlin for irrelevant bureaucratic reasons — the closest thing this movie has to a conventional narrative incident — Hedwig throws a shit fit because she doesn’t want to abandon the perfect home she’s built for her precious Nazi children (whose inherited obliviousness might spark your fleeting sympathies). The brief scene where she chews out a maid over a puddle of water on the floor is the movie’s only real flirtation with on-screen violence.

That being said, the director’s gaze is even more alien here than ever before. In an evolution of the hidden camera tricks he once used to lure real men into Johansson’s van, Glazer shot “The Zone of Interest” with 10 fixed cameras that were placed within the house where roughly 75 percent of the movie takes place, relying on focus-pullers to operate them via remote control. Chronologically overlapping scenes would be shot in different rooms at the same time, from the same distance, and with the same natural or diegetic light — regardless of their dramatic emphasis. 

The approach results in a paradoxical effect: The movie feels guided by a human spirit, but absent of a human touch (a disconnect that proves uniquely compelling, and further embarrasses the limitations of AI). The process instills a flattening evenness into a film where the lack of drama becomes deeply sickening unto itself. Watching Rudolf walk the halls of his house or listen to Hedwig talk about spas from their separate beds isn’t so queasy because the camera doesn’t judge them, but rather because it’s literally incapable of doing so. It sees these characters the same way they see themselves, which is to say both clearly and not at all. 

Do we have to choose, or is it possible that one method can be used to instigate the other? “The Zone of Interest” insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”  

“The Zone of Interest” premiered in Competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters in the U.S.

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The zone of interest.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 2 Reviews
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Common Sense Media Review

Holocaust drama has upsetting scenes, off-camera atrocities.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Zone of Interest is a powerful drama about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and World War II, with the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), setting up their family home next to the concentration camp…

Why Age 13+?

All of the horrid violence and mass genocide happens off camera. But there is a

Jewish people are talked about in dehumanizing ways. Antisemitic comments and sl

A main character is seen smoking cigarettes and cigars on occasion. Two other ch

Characters are seen in bathing suits. A character appears to be forcing a prison

Any Positive Content?

The film is set during World War II with a backdrop (quite literally) of the Aus

Film is set in and around one of the worst atrocities in history: the Holocaust

Rudolf Höss is the commandant of Auschwitz and spends his time planning the best

Violence & Scariness

All of the horrid violence and mass genocide happens off camera. But there is a constant sense of threat, and screams, shouting, and gunshots are routinely heard. Plans are discussed in detail about the best way to increase the numbers of people that can be gassed and burned in the concentration camp. Incinerators in the camp are seen burning, with knowledge that they are burning the bodies of victims. A human bone is found in a river. A young child is seen playing with a victim's teeth. Threats. A soldier is seen with old injuries, including a burned and disfigured face and the loss of an arm. Suggestion that a person in power is using a prisoner for sex. An older sibling locks their younger brother in a greenhouse and makes gassing sounds. Modern-day footage of the museum and memorial at Auschwitz shows the actual gas chambers, as well shoes, photos, and other items of the real-life victims. A character dry-wretches but doesn't actually vomit.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Jewish people are talked about in dehumanizing ways. Antisemitic comments and slurs are heard, such as "Jewess." "Blood hell" is used a couple of times. "My God" used as exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A main character is seen smoking cigarettes and cigars on occasion. Two other characters have a smoke together. During a fancy party, people are seen smoking and drinking, but no drunkenness is depicted.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters are seen in bathing suits. A character appears to be forcing a prisoner to have sex, though nothing is shown. The character is seen washing the prisoner's genitals (no nudity), with suggestion they have just had sex and that the character wants to hide this from their spouse. Character seen shirtless while getting a medical examination. Married couple kiss on the lips. Two teens are seen being affectionate with each other. Character seen in the bath; no nudity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Diverse Representations

The film is set during World War II with a backdrop (quite literally) of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As such, the mass murder of Jewish people and other communities is never far away, although it's never actually depicted on-screen. The film is told from the viewpoint of a Nazi family (with the victims of Auschwitz rarely seen), although their position and behavior is never depicted as anything but abhorrent. Antisemitic comments. Jews are spoken about in dehumanizing terms. Polish people are also oppressed (forced to work for the Nazi family). Frank discussion about how to murder huge numbers of Hungarians. Although the mother of the main family is given agency and is strong-minded, she and her husband do revert to traditional and stereotypical family roles; he the breadwinner and she the stay-at-home housewife and mother.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Messages

Film is set in and around one of the worst atrocities in history: the Holocaust in WWII. Few positive messages other than an underlying sense that such cruelty can never be allowed to happen again. Jewish people are spoken about in dehumanizing terms and are murdered on a massive scale. Those doing so show little to no remorse or even an understanding of the evil they are committing. There are fleeting moments of people feeling unease at what's happening around them—such as when a character cuts short their stay—but this is more to do with how it makes them feel, rather than an outrage at what is happening. One minor character shows courage and compassion in trying to help the condemned.

Positive Role Models

Rudolf Höss is the commandant of Auschwitz and spends his time planning the best way to execute millions of Jews and other communities imprisoned in the camp. He shows little if any remorse for his actions, dehumanizing his victims. His wife, Hedwig Höss, also shows no regard for the victims. Her sole concern is building a beautiful home for her family, a home that literally shares a wall with the concentration camp. She can be cruel to the Polish women who are forced to work for her as servants in her house. Other Nazi soldiers are seen talking callously in their plans to commit mass genocide. A young Polish girl, who plays a minor role, shows great courage and compassion in hiding apples for the prisoners to find.

Parents need to know that The Zone of Interest is a powerful drama about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and World War II, with the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ), setting up their family home next to the concentration camp. Although there is no explicit violence depicted on-screen, you're never allowed to ignore the threat and evil that is taking place over the adjoining wall. Gunshots, screams, and shouting are all heard as the Höss family carry on with their daily lives. The normality of their behavior only adds to the upset. Jewish people are dehumanized, and there are antisemitic slurs and comments. Nazi officers speak candidly about the best ways of killing Jews and other communities, with none showing any remorse or reluctance to carry out the actions. It's suggested Rudolf is using a young prisoner for sexual gratification. He is seen washing his genitals, presumably after sex, although there is no explicit nudity. There is occasional smoking and drinking. Loosely based on the book by Martin Amis, the film is mostly in German, with English subtitles available. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (5)

Based on 2 parent reviews

Required viewing, will make you think about how you live your life

What's the story.

In THE ZONE OF INTEREST, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ), build a family home right next to the concentration camp where millions of prisoners are being murdered. Despite these atrocities taking place on their doorstep, the Höss family loves their way of life, so much so that, when Rudolf is transferred to another post, Hedwig refuses to leave and stays at the home with her children.

Is It Any Good?

The true horrors of this drama, set quite literally in the shadows of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is kept off-camera for the film's duration. But this doesn't lessen the impact of The Zone of Interest , which peers into the everyday family life of one of the main perpetrators of the atrocities. Friedel plays Rudolf Höss, a real-life architect of the Holocaust and the longest-serving commandment of Auschwitz, the concentration camp that oversaw the killing of millions of Jews and people from other communities. It's a chilling portrayal with Hoss both dishing out and following instructions like he was ordering a new office paper run rather than committing mass genocide. Likewise, Rudolf's wife Hedwig's ability to willingly ignore what is happening the other side of the wall that divides her much-loved garden with the concentration camp is a further reminder that evil wears many different guises. These are people implicit in the most horrific of crimes. Yet they are also parents who sit down for dinner with their children or organize pool parties in their backyard. History often asks: How could people have allowed such appalling acts of genocide to occur? For filmmaker Jonathan Glazer , the answer appears to be ... all too easily. And that is yet another horror from this upsetting but important drama.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how they felt watching The Zone of Interest . The movie deals with some emotionally difficult material. Why is it sometimes necessary to experience painful emotions? Why is it important that we don't forget the atrocities of the past?

Despite there being a constant sense of evil, death, and threat, very little violence happens on-screen. Did this lessen the impact of the movie? Why, or why not? How to talk with kids about violence, crime, and war.

Has this movie encouraged you to learn more about World War II and the Holocaust? Where can you find out more about this period of history?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 15, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : February 20, 2024
• Cast : Sandra Hüller , Christian Friedel , Freya Kreutzkam
• Director : Jonathan Glazer
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : A24
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters , History
• Run time : 105 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA - BAFTA Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

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Schindler's List

The Accountant of Auschwitz

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The Zone of Interest Reviews

Despite my feelings on this feature, the film itself is great and really emphasizes the cruelty of the Holocaust even though nothing technically happens on screen, a well-intentioned decision by the filmmakers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 26, 2024

Rather than show fascination even as a criticism of the central characters, Glazer renders the fascists as flat, dull objects.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 19, 2024

The brutal hook of the film is in how it demonstrates the ease in which people, given the right circumstances, can become complicit in evil.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2024

Glazer’s film terrifies not because of what’s on screen but because of what happens off screen.

Full Review | Jul 4, 2024

t’s the banality of banality of banality, transacted beside the low and chatter of genocidal industry next door.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jul 2, 2024

Once it arrives at its subversive, medium-bending conclusion, it’s already cemented its status as one of the toughest, most difficult historical dramas of its era — and one of the most distinctive works of the decade so far.

Full Review | Jun 11, 2024

The question Glazer’s remarkable film raises in the viewer is, “What atrocities do our comfortable lives allow us to ignore?”

Full Review | May 21, 2024

Hedwig and Rudolf are hardly the haunted Macbeths. The only damned spots that concern them are those on the poorly trimmed lilac bushes on the camp’s perimeter.

Full Review | May 14, 2024

Glazer has delivered a profound and deeply unsettling masterpiece that serves as a timely reminder that, as it did in Nazi Germany, true evil continues to exist amid the mundane, and turning a blind eye is nothing less than complicity.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 9, 2024

Presents a weird juxtaposition of mundane family issues against the Holocaust backdrop. It felt overly artistic—just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Artistically bold, but emotionally vacant.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 23, 2024

While the deliberate indifference that is core to this film can be frustrating, Jonathan Glazer offers up his own and the pain of so many to put focus on those that keep going while calamity escalates.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2024

Glazer wants us to reflect on what is normal, and what is abnormal, barbaric, obscene.

Full Review | Apr 19, 2024

It is a harrowing experience realized through a brilliant motion picture.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Mar 24, 2024

By keeping concentration-camp obscenity off-screen, while referring to it obliquely through sci-fi sound effects and abstract visual metaphors, Glazer invites a new, smart-aleck sanctimony... Glazer has made an oddly complacent movie for an amoral era.

Full Review | Mar 22, 2024

The film masterfully juxtaposes the serene family life of the couple with the harrowing reality of genocidal atrocities occurring just beyond their property fence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 22, 2024

Dedicate a decade of one's life on a conceptual film on the diabolical mechanics of the Holocaust, then craft it to appear as meticulously chilling and banal as its architects. [...] Jonathan Glazer is precisely that kind of courageous artist.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 17, 2024

Jonathan Glazer turns us into witnesses of the most mundane, banal, and repugnant side of the Holocaust in a technical, narrative, and above all, hyper-realistic and discourse-driven masterpiece worthy of the most terrible nightmares.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Mar 11, 2024

Jonathan Glazer’s best film to date since Sexy Beast.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 9, 2024

It is this unsettling overlay of routinely innocuous happenings contrasted by moments of total revulsion, that gives The Zone of Interest such an edge and makes it so disturbing.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2024

The Zone of Interest is a misguided and disoriented work, one that conceals the concrete historical circumstances that produced someone like Höss, and therefore weakens the ability of the population today to defeat and destroy the fascist menace.

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‘The Zone of Interest’ movie review: A harrowing, one-of-a-kind portrayal of apathy

‘the zone of interest’ is a holocaust movie unlike anything before; a one-of-a-kind portrayal of the despicability and apathy that human beings can bear to do the gnarliest things as a mundane part of their everyday life.

March 04, 2024 07:55 pm | Updated 07:55 pm IST

A still from ‘The Zone of Interest’ | Photo Credit: A24

Think of the first images that come to mind when you recall the countless masterpieces on the Holocaust that have graced our screens. A striking image of a little boy next to a military tank; a brutalised, pushed-to-the-brink Jewish pianist walking through the streets of a decimated Warsaw; a terrific Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler breaking down, helplessly guilt-tripping on all that he could have done more; or even that of a woman smiling as she looks down at Adolf Hitler from a theatre screen….you get it.

Now, Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar front-runner The Zone of Interest is a Holocaust movie unlike anything before, one which leaves you confused about how you wish to remember it (before the realisation sets that the film only gets more disconcerting and bizarre the more you ponder about it). Every image from this film evokes a sense of despondency, telling a story that is much more chilling to think about in retrospect.

With a haunting background score that reverberates in your head for hours after the movie, you are taken into the world of Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), the wife of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), a commander at a concentration camp in Auschwitz. Through long, uninterrupted static shots we are shown the dream haven that Hedwig has turned this countryside home into, with several maids working in unison to keep their masters and their children leading a life of comfort. They go on picnics, Rudolf loves the view of the river that runs nearby, and Hedwig can’t stop gossiping with the posh German women who visit her.

Now comes the devil in the detail: the Höss’ house borders the Auschwitz concentration camp that Rudolf oversees, and everything about the house  — from the toys the kids play with to the cutlery used to eat food — comes from pillaging through the belongings of the prisoners in the camp. In an extraordinary attempt to display viscerally the chilling casualness with which evil operates, the film puts the atrocities that Jews were subjected to in the background, only suggesting their plights through sound, visual cues and dialogue, while the foreground shows all the merriness of the Nazi life.

The Zone of Interest (German)

Though measuredly told, with complete art-house sensibilities, the film doesn’t wait to hit you where it hurts. Much of the initial scenes follow Hedwig’s fascination for the pretty things she gets from the camp, which is constantly shown in the background, with smoke from the furnaces of these extermination camps rising through the chimneys even at night. In one heart-shattering scene, Hedwig laughs off about how she found a diamond in one of the toothpastes that she had gotten from the camps. “How clever they (Jews) are; I have ordered more toothpaste,” she goes.

How Hedwig reacts to the news of Rudolf’s promotion and subsequent transfer to Oranienburg freezes you with the acute realisation of what the job at the concentration camp meant to these Nazis and their families. If you are shaken by Rudolf’s indifference to his job of leading a slaughterhouse to torture and end millions of lives, and how professional and organised this Nazi machinery has made it all, you are torn to see the extent to which this woman, a dotting mother, is willing to go to save this horror of a world she has built with the blood, sweat and tears of her prisoners.

The Zone of Interest is a one-of-a-kind portrayal of the despicability and apathy that human beings can bear to do the gnarliest things as a mundane part of their everyday life. When you see Hedwig threaten her maid “to have her ashes spread over the fields,” while casually spreading cheese over toast, it is evil showing itself in the most banal fashion on screen.

But again, how does one choose to remember a film that so incessantly, and quite reservedly, focuses only on the perpetrators for a specific emotional effect? What more does this film tell when countless films have told wonderfully the horrors of the holocaust? What is the need to tell this story now? While a lot of these questions remain unanswered, the afterthought that should haunt you for days is this: how does The Zone of Interest reflect us, who like many of these characters choose to be oblivious to the ‘camps’ that exist on the peripheries of our lives?

The Zone of Interest is currently running in theatres

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It’ll haunt you forever: The Zone of Interest reviewed

An extraordinarily powerful film about the commandant of auschwitz that doesn't indulge in any humanisation or dehumanisation.

• From magazine issue: 03 February 2024

Deborah Ross

The Zone of Interest

12A, Nationwide

I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing, but I’m certainly always bracing myself for the latest Holocaust film. There have been some horribly dim ones, such as The Reader or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas , both of which invite you to sympathise with the perpetrators and you know what? I won’t if it’s all the same to you. (Don’t get me started on Schindler’s List ; we’ll be here forever.) But Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest dispenses with the usual conventions. There is no humanising or even dehumanising. There is no pretence at insight. It was what it was; look at how ordinary these mass murderers were. Treated like this, it’s somehow more horrifying and terrifying than Nazis stomping all over the place being evil. It’s extraordinary, powerful, and will haunt you today, tomorrow, and maybe for all your days to come.

It’s extraordinarily powerful and will haunt you maybe for all your days to come

The starting point for Glazer ( Sexy Beast , Birth , Under the Skin ) was Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, as well as his own visit to the gas chambers where he noted that the family home of Rudolf Höss – Auschwitz’s commandant – was so near to the death camp that the two places even shared a wall. Life one side, genocide the other. Nice. How could a family live like this? Easily, it turns out.

The film opens with Mica Levi’s dread-laden score and a black nothingness, and then bright sunshine as we join Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their brood of blonde, healthy children picnicking by a lake. The water sparkles. They splash in the shallows and hunt for wild strawberries. Birds chirp. It’s idyllic. Eventually they make their way home and then it’s the next morning with Rudolf coming down in his SS uniform. This is when we first see how Auschwitz, with black smoke rising, looms over the beautiful, impressively large garden that is Hedwig’s pride and joy, and where the gardenias grow to the size of dinner plates. Rudolf puts on his death cap and goes to work. But we never see him at ‘work’. Not a single death is shown.

This follows the everyday domestic goings-on of the Höss family. It’s Rudolf’s birthday. Hedwig’s mother comes to stay. Rudolf reads the children bedtime stories. That sort of thing. There’s the sight of the occasional prisoner cleaning Höss’s boots or digging ash from the camp’s ovens to use in the garden as a fertiliser. (Nice.) But while kept mostly out of sight, the Jews are never out of mind. Everything happening beyond the garden wall is shown in a myriad of small ways. Hedwig takes delivery of a fur coat that obviously once belonged to a Jewish woman who has been murdered. She tries it on and also tries on the lipstick she finds in its pocket. A son counts his collection of gold teeth – extracted from corpses.

At one point Rudolf is in one room matter-of-factly discussing new, more efficient ways of killing, while Hedwig is gossiping with her friends in another. One says she found a diamond in a tube of toothpaste from the camp. ‘How clever do you have to be?’ she asks. ‘Yes, they are very clever,’ says another friend. The word ‘Jew’ is rarely said – but they all know who they’re talking about. And while we never venture into Auschwitz, we hear it. Always.

The sounds from that place, my God. There are shouts and screams and gun-shots and cracks and pops and guard dogs barking – the soundscape by Johnnie Burn is shattering. But the family tune all that out; they’ve disassociated. There’s something both specific and universal to this, in the sense that complicity can simply be a matter of looking the other way.

The film never feels false or manipulative. It was ten years in the making and included building a replica Höss house near the original one and starting the garden from scratch. Glazer also took the decision to use no artificial lighting – he thought it might ‘glamourise’ the Höss family – and no camera crew was ever present within the house. Instead, it’s hidden cameras and long takes, leading us to feel as remote from them as they are from it. They are never ‘relatable’.

Lastly I should say it isn’t true that Höss murdered three-and-a-half million Jews because as he said at Nuremberg: ‘[It was] only two-and-a-half million – one million died of disease and starvation.’ It is always good to put the record straight.

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Jonathan Glazer’s Auschwitz Drama Borders on the Unwatchable

This review was originally published on May 22, 2023. At the 2024 Oscars , The Zone of Interest won two awards, including Best International Feature.

“What I wanted to film was the contrast between somebody pouring a cup of coffee in their kitchen and somebody being murdered over on the other side of the wall.” That’s how Jonathan Glazer describes his intentions in The Zone of Interest , the Auschwitz drama that got a wild reception from critics at Cannes. The shock of Glazer’s picture is not in the graphic terrors it depicts, but in what it purposefully doesn’t show. He gives us the person pouring their coffee, but only hints at the terrors beyond the wall. And yet, his film is so psychologically searing it borders on the unwatchable.

The Zone of Interest , which A24 will release later this year, is theoretically based on the late Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, and it happened to premiere at Cannes the day before Amis’s passing at the age of 73 . One is tempted to say something about this coincidence, but Glazer appears to have taken pretty much just the setting and the title from Amis; the movie has almost nothing to do with the book, which has an actual plot and characters. It’s a similar approach to what Glazer tried in his previous film, for which he turned Michel Faber’s 2000 novel Under the Skin into a demented, practically experimental horror-sci-fi art film starring Scarlett Johansson. ( Under the Skin was ten years ago; Birth , his previous feature, was 2004. Glazer takes his time with these projects.)

The new film follows, through calm, quotidian wide shots, the daily life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family. It opens with a lengthy, bucolic image of a picnic beside a placid lake. We might marvel at the beauty and peacefulness of this setting — the kind of thing fond summer memories are built on. Over the course of the picture, as we watch birthdays and tea parties and catch snippets of casual conversations, we also hear the constant churn of the death camp behind the walls, occasionally punctuated by distant gunshots and screams. Sometimes, in the evenings, we might notice the plumes of smoke, while the Höss family continues about their business. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), Rudolf’s wife, spends much of her time cultivating and perfecting her “paradise garden,” taking great care with the gorgeous flowers, bushes, and vines, and Glazer makes sure to give each plant a beautiful, loving close-up as she talks about the care they need.

It’s not so much that what’s happening in Auschwitz is ignored, but that it comes up in the most blood-chillingly mundane ways. Women talk about trying on dresses and coats that once belonged to Jewish families. “I’ll go on a diet,” says one when remarking that one coat doesn’t fit her. “Guess where I found this diamond?” someone asks at one point. “In the toothpaste.” They gossip about a Jewish neighbor who used to have book readings, and about how she outbid them once on some curtains. They wonder if she’s “in there.” At night, the boys stay up late in bed, pointing flashlights at their collections of teeth the way you or I might have once read a children’s novel.

Glazer produced the film in unorthodox fashion, with multiple locked-down cameras rolling simultaneously in different rooms, and the actors free to move about and stay in different spaces without a crew present. (The layout of the Höss residence was reportedly based on extensive research into their actual house; this really was how they lived.) The frames still manage to feel highly composed, as if the actors have been blocked to within an inch of their lives; Glazer has clearly boned up on his Haneke. But the images also have the quality of surveillance footage, which adds to the unsettling mood and sets our minds racing.

This kind of formalist approach, cross-breeding narrative cinema and conceptual art, can be hard to maintain without slipping into tedium. But Glazer knows to develop the idea without abandoning his rigor. The evil beyond the walls (and, really, the evil within the walls) makes itself known in almost psychosomatic ways. Hedwig’s mother, who is staying with her daughter, finds herself unable to sleep. When Rudolf finds bone fragments and ash drifting down the stream where his kids are swimming, he fears for their health and makes sure they get a good washing. Later, he has a mysterious bout of nonstop vomiting.

One of Rudolf’s daughters constantly sleepwalks. From her sojourns Glazer cuts to impressively creepy night-vision shots of a mysterious girl wandering the area, placing what appear to be pieces of food in the dirt. She finds a tightly folded-up piece of paper, which contains some music — a composition by a prisoner that she then plays on a piano, each note conveying a line of grim poetry. One world is constantly bleeding into the other.

In some ways, the buzz of domesticity we’re watching is a machine as efficient as the death factory thrumming in the background. When Rudolf gets a promotion to the head office in Berlin, he and Hedwig quarrel. She doesn’t want to leave. Why should she? She’s spent all this time building a beautiful garden, it’s a great place to raise the kids, and they’ve made so many lovely memories here. (“This is our Lebensraum ,” she says, using the word for “living space” that was used to justify Imperial Germany’s expansionism in the early 20th century and became a buzzword for Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s.) It’s the kind of argument spouses have had since time immemorial, and it’s so terrifying here because it feels totally real. The everyday cadences of the film, the trifling conversations about flowers and kids and neighbors and hand-me-down clothes and where to live, are clearly meant to be relatable. In its own sly and subtly devastating way, The Zone of Interest pulls us into its circle of evil.

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• "Filming Zone" Directed, Edited, & Photographed by Filip Skronc

Product details

• Parcel Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 17.27 x 13.84 x 1.41 cm
• Canadian Home Video Rating ‏ : ‎ Parental Guidance (PG)
• Director ‏ : ‎ Jonathan Glazer
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ NTSC, 4K, Subtitled
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 45 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ Oct. 15 2024
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Christian Friedel, Sandra Huller
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
• Producers ‏ : ‎ James Wilson, Ewa Puszczynska
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DDR4RK67
• Country of origin ‏ : ‎ Canada
• Writers ‏ : ‎ Jonathan Glazer
• #13 in Drama (Movies & TV Shows)
• #35 in Blu-ray

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