the zone movie review

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• <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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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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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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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

Chief Film Critic

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Paul schrader's 'oh, canada' secures french release, new ruben östlund, lorcan finnegan projects at cannes investors circle, the zone of interest.

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Zone of Interest review – Jonathan Glazer adapts Martin Amis’s chilling Holocaust drama

Focusing on the everyday domesticity of the Auschwitz commandant’s family might only reflect the horror indirectly, but the film pulls the banality of evil into pin-sharp focus

A single, satanic joke burns through the celluloid in Jonathan Glazer’s technically brilliant, uneasy Holocaust movie, freely adapted by the director from the novel by Martin Amis, a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste. How did the placidly respectable home life of the German people coexist with imagining and executing the horrors of the genocide? How did such evil flower within what George Steiner famously called the German world of “silent night, holy night, gemütlichkeit ”?

The film imagines the pure bucolic bliss experienced by Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) who with his family lives in a handsomely appointed family home with servants just outside the barbed-wire-topped wall. His wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) is thrilled with the Edenic “paradise garden” she has been allowed to supervise at the rear, complete with greenhouse: she revels smugly in her unofficial title “Queen of Auschwitz” – and with just that line alone, The Zone of Interest has probably delivered enough nausea for a thousand films.

The Hösses love to go fishing and bathing in the beautiful lakes and streams of the Polish countryside thereabouts, although at one stage Höss discovers what appears to be bone fragments and dark particulate matter in the river that has washed downstream from the camp and curtly orders his children out of the water and back to their lovely home for a wash.

But really they live in complete denial in an enclosed world. Family life continues in all its unimaginable dysfunction, scene follows scene in unbearable affectless detachment, with the children being attended to, the servants instructed, the Nazi wives gossiped with (they chat about a nice dress salvaged from some “little Jewess”) Hedwig’s mother is welcomed into the house, and all the time screams, shouts and gunshots are continuously audible from over the wall. They are used to it. Meanwhile, the SS officers discuss the most technically efficient means of mass extermination; we never enter the camp itself, though Höss indulges himself with a female prisoner in his office.

Perhaps the most stunning shot created by Glazer and his cinematographer Łukasz Żal is the pin-sharp, deep focus view from the Hösses’ charming front garden down the path to the camp wall, behind which the chimney is visible against a vivid, hallucinatory blue sky: Höss likes to tour the horrendous compound on horseback. It really has the scalp-prickling quality of a bad dream or a fairytale.

But the horror of what is happening begins to surface in aberrant behaviour: a child sleepwalks and Hedwig’s mother is more disturbed by this menage than she will admit; troubled by the memory of once having worked for a Jewish woman that Hedwig briskly agrees may indeed be in the camp a few hundred metres from where they are talking in the beautiful garden. Their grotesque family life comes to an end when Höss is ordered back to Berlin as a deputy inspector of the camps, but Hedwig demands to be allowed to stay behind with the children in the commandant’s quarters because this is the best place to raise the children. The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history: I found myself thinking of Jacques Rivette’s objection to the barbed-wire tracking shot in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960). Glazer’s movie is however, at least arguably, in the tradition of representing the horror indirectly, like Claude Lanzmann and Michael Haneke. And the film does try to accommodate Jewish testimony, though the final coda sequence in the modern-day Auschwitz museum may absolve the film of flippancy, but does oddly represent a kind of loss of nerve – as if the movie finally can’t bear to stay within the prison of historical irony and has to flashforward out of there to restate its humane credentials. Yet there can be no doubt of Glazer’s focus on an evil which creates its own banality, the banality which allowed the mass murderers to go about their business.

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

By Richard Lawson

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

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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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Then Höss is back home, reading bedtime stories to his kids, sharing inside jokes with his wife, wondering if hitting his quarterly numbers might lead to a promotion. All the while, a soundtrack of wails and weaponry and incoming trains play as if they were on a loop. Rudolf and Hedda and their offspring no longer register such things. But you do. And it’s that exact gap where Glazer has daringly placed this chronicle of the banality surrounding the banality of evil.

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Except all of these elements aren’t being used to dazzle or awe; they’ve been carefully and meticulously employed to make a point and immerse you in a mood. Glazer does not want you to be wowed by The Zone of Interest — he wants you to understand how things like this happen, and who makes such things happen. It was done by men with families, wives who take issue with uneven power dynamics in their marital partnerships, regular people who lace antisemitic bile into their polite coffee-klatch chatter. It was done with the constant humming of hell in the background, all but absorbed into the daily fabric of those just going about their business following orders.

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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 year’s scariest horror film is The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s new film dismantles simple cliches about the banality of evil.

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The Zone of Interest , Jonathan Glazer’s first film in 10 years, is ostensibly based on a book: Martin Amis’s stomach-churning 2014 novel of the same name. But understanding the movie’s formal and thematic genius requires looking at it differently: as a sidelong horror-film adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem , one that goes way beyond that book’s well-worn idea of the “banality of evil.” That phrase, lifted from Eichmann ’s subtitle, furnishes most people’s entire Arendt knowledge base: the idea that evil presents itself not as a devil with horns and a pitchfork, but in seemingly egoless, “mediocre” men like Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution , who carry out unspeakable atrocities.

That’s not wrong, but it’s much too simple, verging on cliche — ironic, given Arendt’s warnings. In her reporting on Eichmann’s trial, Arendt noted how he spoke only in “stock phrases and self-invented cliches,” the kinds of euphemisms that Arendt said indicated a refusal to think for oneself. In this, Eichmann was a true company man; the Third Reich was notorious for inventing language and speech codes that made following the rules seem inevitable. The Nazi Sprachregelung , or its particular bureaucratic vocabulary, was euphemistic in the extreme. Killing became “dispatching”; forced migration became “resettlement”; the mass murder of the Jews became Eichmann’s “final solution.” When you call what you’re doing to millions of your neighbors “special treatment,” you don’t have to think about what it really is. You might even start to enjoy the challenge of doing it more officially.

This Sprachregelung is all over The Zone of Interest , in part because its characters don’t talk about murder or genocide, but also because Glazer — whose previous film was the brilliantly unsettling Under the Skin — replicates the characters’ internal distance through the movie’s images and sounds. The result is unsettling in the extreme. It takes a few minutes of watching to realize what, precisely, you’re looking at, and the nauseating shock at that moment packs a stronger punch than any horror movie I’ve seen this year. Here is the sunny, flower-filled, orderly front garden, in front of a well-appointed and tidy home in which a large, cheerful family lives. But wait; just beyond the yard is a tall gray cement fence with barbed wire on top, and smokestacks visible in the distance.

On the other side of the garden wall is Auschwitz.

The home is occupied by the notorious extermination camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real man, played here by Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ), their large brood of children, and a few servants, at least one of whom seems to be Jewish. The Zone of Interest keeps the Höss family in the foreground. We see them on a picnic, having family dinners, spending time playing in the garden, enjoying their greenhouse and their pool. Hedwig is a nurturing mother and hospitable housekeeper.

While they live out their lives in their happy house, we watch with horror. Smartly, Glazer gives us only the most minimal amount of character background; this is emphatically not a movie where there’s a “good Nazi” to root for. Instead, it shows how the whole Nazi system was designed to ensure that nobody could be good. We’re hearing the Hösses talk about life in the foreground. But there’s an ambient noise in The Zone of Interest , akin to the hum of a white noise machine — except in this case it’s omnipresent, the sound of furnaces in the distance, laced with occasional gunshots and howls. To hear what’s going on in the house, we have to tune them out a little. I hope we can’t.

The characters, however, have. Höss and his colleagues have been deeply formed by the regime in which they’ve made their careers, in which Nazi ideology is encoded in its language and systems. (They speak with awe and obedience of Himmler and of Hitler — and, of course, of Eichmann.) Höss has made a name for himself as an executor of efficient systems: “His particular strength is turning theory into practice,” a letter that a colleague writes about him explains. The practice of killing, that is.

It would be inexcusable and deadly wrong to say that The Zone of Interest is about people living in blissful ignorance about what’s going on just over the garden wall. They know exactly what’s happening; they’ve just, essentially, dissociated. Höss talks about gassing thousands of Jews as if it’s an interesting problem to be solved, but it’s his job. What’s more chilling is that his family knows. Hedwig — who proudly tells her mother she’s been nicknamed the “queen of Auschwitz” — admires a fur coat that arrives in a shipment brought in by a prisoner, trying on the lipstick she finds in the pocket. She warns the Jewish girl who works in the house that she could “have my husband spread your ashes” across the fields. She speaks with her visiting mother about whether a former neighbor of theirs, a Jewish woman her mother cleaned for, is “in there.” There’s a tinge of revenge, the feeling that if she is, she probably deserves it because she was probably plotting Bolshevik nonsense in days gone by.

Perhaps the most telling scene comes when two of the young sons are playing in the backyard. The older locks the younger in the greenhouse — and then makes noises of gassing at him. The only family member who seems unable to ignore the horror of what’s happening is the baby, who screams whenever the ovens light up.

The sound design in The Zone of Interest is so extraordinarily effective that it’s easy to miss what the film is doing on a visual level. The scenes of familial bliss take place in a beautiful garden or a comfortable home, but they’re shot with a severity that belies the setting; this is a world gone flat, a paean to a fascist dream of life properly lived, yet all surfaces and no depths. To live such a life would require a hollowing out, an ability to continually ignore one’s senses — those ovens smell awful, but Hedwig never indicates she can smell them at all — until they more or less cease functioning. The insistent bright ugliness gives way occasionally to something shocking (a few black-and-white segments reversed into photonegative, or a shot of a flower that fades to blood-red), all the better to remind us that none of this is beautiful, and we ought to be horrified.

Introducing her book The Life of the Mind by writing about her Eichmann observations again, Arendt could have been writing about the Hösses. She was “struck by the manifest shallowness” in Eichmann, which made it “impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.” In fact, she wrote, while his deeds were monstrous, she saw that “the doer — at least the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

What is monstrous is the insistently abstracted language the Hösses and other Nazis use in order to avoid thought, especially contrasted with the wordless screams that Mica Levi has worked into the score. Höss is praised for his advances in “KL practice” (KL standing for Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp); we watch him deep in conversation about circular burn chambers that can more efficiently exterminate. “Burn, cool, unload, reload, continuously!” the designer tells him. We watch rooms full of Nazi commandants applaud news of the beginning of the “mass deportation” of Hungarian Jews, with 25 percent “retained for labor.” Nobody says exactly what they mean.

Arendt wrote that the Nazi Sprachregelung introduced a degree of separation between the users and reality, making the horrors of Hitler’s ideas, as Arendt put it, “somehow palatable.” Another way to say this is that humans are capable of great cruelties and monstrosities, but we’re also creatures of compassion and empathy. To see others as sub-human, worthy of prejudice or slavery or torture or extermination, we need to be coached through some mental gymnastics. We need words that disconnect us from reality, that put a layer of remove between us and them, between action and thought. Between our humanity and what we are capable of.

The effect of watching The Zone of Interest ought, I think, to make us feel a mounting horror — and then, from there, to make us think, an act Arendt was always writing about. In the Life of the Mind introduction, she argued that the antidote to the thoughtless cruelty of the autocratic systems around us might be thinking: “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?”

Maybe, she wrote. “Could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evildoing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” she asks. In other words, could learning to think, to avoid cliched thought and stock phrases, train us out of complacency? Could being shocked and horrified and made profoundly uncomfortable, left without easy language, perpetuate a moral good?

What Glazer does with The Zone of Interest is give the audience just a taste of that shock, and then force us into thinking. He never shows the atrocities outright — not to pique our curiosity but because we do not want to see them. To depict it would be, in its own way, an atrocity. Instead, he adds a visual and aural layer of abstraction in order to let us test ourselves, to see if we are, perhaps, the sort of people willing to be in their place now.

“The dividing line,” Arendt wrote, “between those who want to think, and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences.” All that seems clear right now, at this point in history, is this question is eternally worth facing.

The Zone of Interest is playing in theaters.

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The Zone of Interest review: Jonathan Glazer's haunting WW2 drama

One of the best movies of 2023 (even if most of us are seeing it in 2024)..

What to Watch Verdict

A masterful piece of filmmaking from Jonathan Glazer that is poignant, heartbreaking and restrained all at the same time.

Jonathan Glazer reaffirms his position as a top tier director

A haunting sound design

Never tasteless or pandering, perfectly handling the sensitive subject matter

The Zone of Interest will wreck you. Jonathan Glazer's movie, which initially premiered in December 2023 and has since been expanding to more areas, is a gut punch, showing how people are willing to turn a blind eye to horrors if it can benefit them, but how they are never truly gone and will haunt you one way or the other. Yet because it is so exquisitely made you will not be able to look away, drawn to the power of the images and message presented on the screen.

To put it simply, The Zone of Interest is one of the best movies of the year. While other movies dealing with dark and/or tough subject matters may be more entertaining ( Killers of the Flower Moon ) or enthralling to watch unfold ( Oppenheimer ), it is Glazer's decision to not mine the easy emotional moments and yet make sure the audience never forgets what is really going on that make The Zone of Interest so breathtaking.

Based on Martin Amis book of the same name, The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War 2, and his family, including his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children. The movie depicts them living in a house that is immediately adjacent to the camp.

Yet despite the proximity, the actual plot of The Zone of Interest has almost nothing to do with the concentration camp. Instead the primary focus of the characters are how they are living the life they always dreamt of having — a nice house, a beautiful garden, people waiting on them and respect from those around them. They never question why or how they came into this situation, but the movie never lets the audience forget. A wall surrounds the garden, with the camp right on the other side, its buildings hovering over the scene in nearly all instances. And if the building (or smoke stacks) aren't visible, the sound of gunshots and screams over this family playing in the garden without a care in the world fills the gap.

This is the first feature-length movie that Glazer has directed since 2013's sci-fi movie Under the Skin , but he has clearly not lost a step. Glazer's directing in The Zone of Interest has few equals in this or any year, firmly placing him as one of the premier directors working right now. Every choice he makes in this movie is unassailable.

While it is certainly Glazer's movie from beginning to end, Friedel and Hüller (who stars in another excellent 2023 movie, Anatomy of a Fall ) manage from time to time to almost make you forget that the characters we are following are despicable Nazis who profited off the genocide of the Jewish people. But then again, if that feeling ever starts to creep up — like in The Zone of Interest ending — Glazer hits you with another brilliant choice to put everything back to its proper perspective.

We have seen movies that deal with the Holocaust before, but in most cases they attempt to show the humanity that managed to break through from this terrible moment in human history ( Schindler's List ) or give a direct look into the horrors ( Son of Saul ). But The Zone of Interest is here to remind us that there are those who will turn away from atrocities if it does not directly impact them, or worse, if it may benefit them, and it is on all of us to make sure that we don't let ourselves become numb or willfully ignorant in the face of injustice.

That is why The Zone of Interest is an experience worth watching. It will not be easy, but a similar theme with other movies from 2023, we must not turn a blind eye to our failings so we can be sure to never do them again.

The Zone of Interest is playing exclusively in US movie theaters. It releases in the UK on February 2.

Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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“The Zone of Interest” Finds Banality in the Evil of Auschwitz

By Anthony Lane

Life is good, on a fine day, by a glittering lake. A family picnic on the grass, a merry swim, and the comforting of a crying baby. Such is the opening scene of “The Zone of Interest,” a new film from Jonathan Glazer. The family is that of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ), and their five children. Later, as darkness gathers, they drive back home to their orderly house, beside the walls of Auschwitz .

Höss is not a fictional invention. He was the commandant at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, and returned there in May, 1944, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, specifically to oversee the extermination of Hungarian Jews. Their arrival in unprecedented numbers—up to twelve thousand a day—was a logistical challenge to which S.S. Obersturmbannführer Höss was trusted to rise. Train lines were extended so that they ran right up to two of the crematoriums. The entire operation even bore his name: Aktion Höss . A rare honor.

Of the killings that were meted out under the aegis of Höss, “The Zone of Interest” shows none. Much of the story is set in the house where he and his loved ones dwell, with its pretty garden, rich in blooms. There are trips to the surrounding countryside, although, in one unfortunate incident, Höss is obliged to chivy his offspring out of a river, where they are paddling, because human remains have washed downstream. Another inconvenience: the daily routine of the Höss household is punctuated by yelps and cries, the chug of trains, the firing of weapons, and a low but discernible roar, as if some beast—a fire-breathing dragon—had its lair beyond the garden wall. What lies out of sight need not be out of earshot. Either way, you might think, it cannot be out of mind.

Think again. “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.” The words are Dostoyevsky’s, in “ Memoirs from the House of the Dead ,” and he is writing of prisoners in Siberia. The definition applies, however, not just to the victims of cruelty but also to its perpetrators. What is demonstrated by “The Zone of Interest”—which Glazer adapted, very obliquely, from a novel by the late Martin Amis—is that, given the right conditions, people can discover in themselves a pathological talent for ignoring the torments of others. Look at Frau Höss, sorting through clothing that has been stripped from those who are due to be gassed (the implication is clear, though never spelled out) and seeing what takes her fancy. Finding a fur coat, she models it in front of a mirror, turning from side to side to catch her best angle. This is, I would say, the most repellent image in the movie, enshrining all that is pitiless in Hüller’s terrifying performance. Who will merit the lower circle of Hell: Höss, discussing the most efficient method for meeting his murderous quota, or Hedwig, serving coffee to friends?

It’s no surprise that, when Höss is posted to another job, Hedwig is aghast. She wants to stay at Auschwitz, tending her flowers, rather than uproot the children and move on. Such is the plain shape of the plot. In a sense, “The Zone of Interest” is a simple work: calmly composed, fiercely controlled, and dedicated to the proof of one central irony—the nearness of ordinary lives to a tumult of death. Glazer achieves what he sets out to do, and you have to admire his tenacity, his technical skill, and his tact. Too many dramatizations of the Holocaust have left us flinching and queasy, whereas Glazer, in choosing so precisely what to show and what not to show, gives us no chance (and no excuse) to look away.

Yet one has to ask: Is this movie couched in its most effective form? In making the same point, however morally urgent, over and over again, does the film fortify or weaken its case? Go back to “ Night and Fog ,” Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary, from 1956—filmed partly in Auschwitz and Majdanek, another site of organized slaughter in Poland—and you will find the same argument put forward with greater economy. We see archival photographs of a commandant’s residence (where, a narrator tells us, “his wife keeps house and entertains”) and of guests playing chess and enjoying drinks. The sequence lasts roughly fifteen seconds; the whole movie is over in half an hour. If “The Zone of Interest” were that long it would attract fewer viewers, but I wonder if such brevity might not heighten its power to stupefy an audience, as “Night and Fog” does, and to reduce us to silence.

Glazer’s previous feature, “ Under the Skin ,” has clawed at me since it came out, ten years ago. It’s too early to say whether “The Zone of Interest” will do the same. What will linger, no question, is the score by Mica Levi, who seems to make music out of pain, replete with whisperings and groans. Most extraordinary of all, we get nocturnal scenes, dotted throughout the movie and shot in black-and-white, using thermal imaging, in which a young girl is seen secreting apples in the landscape nearby. For a while, there is no knowing who she is, whether the fruit (which glows in the dark) is poisonous or life-giving, and whether we are watching a dream or a weird substratum of the horrors unfolding at Auschwitz. Nor is there any comfort in suggesting that the girl could have sprung from a book of old German fairy tales. We know how those can end.

One way of approaching “Anselm,” a new documentary by Wim Wenders , is to see it as a sequel, of sorts, to “The Zone of Interest.” The German artist Anselm Kiefer was born in March, 1945, just as the age of Rudolf Höss, and of all that he espoused, was falling apart. Whether you can or should create art in the wake of mass ruination, and what form that art will take, are matters with which Kiefer has rarely ceased to contend. In 1969, he photographed himself giving the Sieg heil —a criminal gesture in postwar Germany—at various European locations, including the Colosseum, in Rome. Since then, he has grown industrious and toweringly ambitious, to the point of constructing actual towers. Never is he more fertile than when dealing in blight. His sculptures, paintings, drawings, and books—not so much published texts as booklike objects, whose pages may be made of lead—seem like testaments to the memory of things too heavy to bear.

In choppy fashion, “Anselm” cuts to and fro among events in Kiefer’s life. Dramatization abuts recorded fact. Anselm the boy, in shorts, with a satchel on his back, is played by an actor, as is the grownup Kiefer, with a mustache, setting off to meet Joseph Beuys (an early mentor) in a VW Beetle, with canvases rolled up and stacked like logs on its roof. Much of the movie, though, is set in the present day, with the real Kiefer going about his business. And what a business! Here is art made with muscle and cool tools. One painting is laid flat on the floor, so that Kiefer can lace it with molten lead; in closeup, we see the splatter and fizz. A long palette knife is the nearest that he comes to a paintbrush. Goggle-free, he wields a flamethrower, with which, like a farmer burning stubble, he sets fire to canvases pasted with straw—a material to which his work has obsessively returned. Assistants then douse the blaze.

Notice, also, the question of scale. The monumental (a far from neutral term, in the light of Nazi aesthetics) holds few terrors for Kiefer. Indeed, there is defiance in his panoramic ventures. I can’t forget the shock of standing for the first time in front of “Aschenblume,” or “Ash Flower,” a vast painting that occupied Kiefer from 1983 to 1997, in which a dead sunflower clings, upside down, to a rat-colored surface, its seedless head bedded in cracked earth. In “Anselm,” we see Kiefer using a motorized platform that can be raised and lowered, the better to toil on an especially large picture, as if he were washing windows. But how can a film begin to convey these Brobdingnagian dimensions?

Easy. Just find a cinema screen to match the art. I saw “Anselm” not only in 3-D but in IMAX —conditions I hadn’t encountered since “ Avatar: The Way of Water ” (2022), which Wenders has said he loves. Here are Kiefer’s epic installations, unfurling grandly across our frame of vision. We are ushered through the spaces that he has made his own: a studio so big that he needs a bicycle to scoot around in it; a repurposed brick factory; and a two-hundred-acre site in Barjac, in southern France. If the result is not as fluent as “Pina” (2011), Wenders’s earlier exercise in 3-D, that’s because “Pina” was about a dance company, to whose movements the camera became a willing partner. The latest movie is both more fractured and more indulgent, and I reckon that Wenders misses a trick; many of Kiefer’s densest paintings are themselves in 3-D, as it were, with pigments and other ingredients jutting out like frozen mud, and they deserve to be filmed from the side, not merely head on. Nonetheless, “Anselm” compels attention. We long-term Kiefer nerds may not learn much, but so what? It’s more important that newcomers thrill to—or recoil from—this self-mythicizing figure who forges sculptures out of fighter planes and U-boats. The zones of interest run deep. ♦

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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

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Watch The Zone of Interest with a subscription on Max, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Dispassionately examining the ordinary existence of people complicit in horrific crimes, The Zone of Interest forces us to take a cold look at the mundanity behind an unforgivable brutality.

The Zone of Interest is a disturbing look at how easily evil can be normalized, although its slow pace will challenge some viewers.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Jonathan Glazer

Christian Friedel

Rudolf Höss

Sandra Hüller

Hedwig Höss

Medusa Knopf

Daniel Holzberg

Gerhard Maurer

Sascha Maaz

Arthur Liebehenschel

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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 media reviewers.

Holocaust drama has upsetting scenes, off-camera atrocities.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Film is set in and around one of the worst atrocit

Rudolf Höss is the commandant of Auschwitz and spe

The film is set during World War II with a backdro

All of the horrid violence and mass genocide happe

Characters are seen in bathing suits. A character

Jewish people are talked about in dehumanizing way

A main character is seen smoking cigarettes and ci

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…

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 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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• Kids say (3)

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
• Last updated : April 1, 2024

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Cannes: You’ve Never Seen a Holocaust Film Like ‘The Zone of Interest’

The disorienting drama from “Under the Skin” director Jonathan Glazer may be in the running for a major prize at the festival.

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By Kyle Buchanan

You might not know where you are when “The Zone of Interest” begins, and that’s by design. This new film from the director Jonathan Glazer , which has been hotly tipped for a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival since its premiere Friday night, opens on a bucolic picnic by the lake. Family members chat in German, wander off, attend to children and soak up the sun. And Glazer’s long, wide shots let us settle in, too.

Eventually, they go home, and in their nice two-story house, parents Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) retire to separate beds. In the morning, their daily routines begin: Maids prepare breakfast, children scatter, Rudolf dresses for work. But it’s all filmed in such faraway wide shots that it may take you a moment, once Rudolf walks into the front yard, to realize that this man is wearing an SS uniform.

From there, you might pick up on more unsettling details. Aren’t the walls that surround Hedwig’s garden topped by barbed wire? Can you barely make out the buildings on the other side, some of which billow smoke? And as the children play, don’t those faint, far-off noises start to sound like gunshots, guard dogs and screams?

This family’s life by the lake is only a bucolic idyll if you have blinders on — and to live there, you must — because it soon becomes clear that Rudolf is a Nazi commandant, and the house that Hedwig describes as her dream home abuts Auschwitz.

“The Zone of Interest,” adapted from the novel by Martin Amis , is Glazer’s first film in a decade. The British director has only three feature credits to his name, but each one — the raucous “Sexy Beast” (2001), the stunning Nicole Kidman drama “Birth” (2004) and the sci-fi tour de force “Under the Skin” (2014) — is so potent that he has never felt far gone.

Still, Glazer has never had a mainstream breakthrough or significant awards push, and I’m curious if it can come with “The Zone of Interest,” which will be distributed by A24 later this year. A Palme d’Or at Cannes would certainly help, but Glazer’s directing ought to attract a lot of attention: He frames the family’s mundane activities in static wide shots, cutting only when someone enters another room, as though they themselves are under eerie surveillance.

The Cannes jury might also reward Hüller, whose performance as selfish Hedwig is chilling. As Jews are killed next door, she recalls a trip and asks her husband, “Will you take me to the spa in Italy again? All that pampering.” Anything that happens past the walls of her luxurious garden simply doesn't exist, or else it offers a mercenary opportunity: She eagerly tries on a confiscated fur coat and tells Rudolf to look for more items stolen from the camp’s prisoners. “Chocolate, if you see it,” she wheedles. “Tiny goodies.”

And if the film connects enough to become an awards contender down the road, I hope voters will pay attention to its carefully calibrated sound design. In the early going, there’s a hush, the kind of quiet you can have only if something is notably absent. Later, the sounds that drift from the camp are harder to ignore. Perhaps when “The Zone of Interest” began, we were listening through Hedwig’s ears.

As we filed out after the premiere, the man sitting next to me confessed that he only understood 50 percent of the film. But I think the other 50 percent is meant to be felt, and for all of Glazer’s formal precision, he leaves plenty of room for viewers to come to their own conclusions. Does the family’s denial have contemporary parallels? How do the rhythms of work and life mitigate unimaginable horrors? And what did you hear in the hush before you could make out the screams?

Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and serves as The Projectionist , the awards season columnist for The Times. He is the author of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road.” More about Kyle Buchanan

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Zone of Interest’ on Max, an Unblinking Stare at the Banality of Evil

Where to stream:.

• The Zone of Interest
• Jonathan Glazer

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Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make feature films very often, but when he does, we get an unforgettable work like The Zone of Interest ( now streaming on Max , in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ). The acclaimed director of Sexy Beast , Birth and Under the Skin spent years researching and preparing to make this banality-of-evil story about Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commandant who was not only in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp, but also lived immediately next door to it. Seeking to remove as much of the “artifice of filmmaking” as possible, Glazer set up multiple static cameras inside a detailed replica of Hoss’ home – built very close to the real thing, which still stands – and let his cast simply “exist” in the set, the Hoss family going about its suburban routine while the sounds of genocide creep over a fence and into their idyllic garden. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Director, and stands, like so many Holocaust films before it, as one those movies you’ll appreciate on many levels, and be glad that you’ve seen, but probably will never want to see again.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Location, location, location. Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller, Oscar nominee for Anatomy of a Fall ) Hoss don’t live in an extravagant home, but it’s still beautiful. Their daughters’ room is cozy and bright, Rudolf’s office is stately and the dining room is grand. The piece de resistance, though, is the garden, which is Hedwig’s pride – it stretches across a few parcels, and includes a pool for the children to play in, a broad diversity of flowering plants (including towering rows of sunflowers) and a sprawling greenhouse. We first meet the Hoss family as they look excessively pale in the sunlight along the bank of a lake. It’s a gorgeous day. They’ve taken their two sons, two daughters and baby for a swim and picnic. By the time they get home, the crickets are chirping in the twilight, the soothing warble blending in with the not-quite-distant sounds of gunshots, screaming, diesel engines and other sounds of the industry of systematic genocide.

It’s Rudolf’s birthday. The children are thrilled to gift him a three-person kayak, so new, the paint’s still fresh. He puts the baby in it and laughs that she’ll have a green bottom. All the officers from the Auschwitz camp gather outside Rudolf’s back door to wish him a happy birthday; higher-ups will meet inside his home office later to go over the blueprints for their new highly efficient mass-cremation system. When he has a rare day off, he takes two of the kids to the nearby Soln for a spin in the kayak. As they swim and he wades into the river with his fishing rod, he steps on something. It’s a human jawbone. He dashes from the water and rushes the children home, where the nanny and housekeeper scrub them in the bathtub, cleaning off any remnants of ash. At nighttime, Rudolf makes the rounds, turning off lights and locking doors. In one bedroom, he and Hedwig giggle and laugh quietly in their twin-sized beds, separated by a nightstand; in another, their elder son lays in bed with a flashlight, sifting through a box of gold teeth.

Hedwig’s mother arrives for a visit, her first at the Auschwitz house. Hedwig gives her a guided tour of the garden – a “paradise garden,” her mother labels it – and they sit near a lovely pergola, not hearing, or pretending not to hear, the grinding sounds of the industry of death churning mere yards away, on the other side of a tall privacy fence topped with barbed wire like Christ’s crown of thorns. They host a party and we get a shot of the children splashing in the pool as we see plumes of smoke progressing across the horizon from a train arriving at the camp; from the opposite angle, the brick buildings that house gas chambers and furnaces loom ominously. As they sit poolside, Rudolf tells Hedwig that he’s been so successful at overseeing Auschwitz, he’s been promoted from commandant to deputy inspector. They’ll have to relocate to Oranienburg in Germany. Hedwig is incensed. Have you seen her garden? Have you seen how happy the children are? This is their dream, she argues, and it’s even better than they ever thought it’d be. Why would anyone ever want to leave this?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: File The Zone of Interest next to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon among modern cinema’s most miserably effective examinations of the worst of humanity.

Performance Worth Watching: Between this and Anatomy of a Fall , 2023 marked an extraordinary year for Huller. Both films gave her a platform to explore compellingly thorny moral gray areas; in The Zone of Interest , her characterization is all about fascinatingly superhuman feats of compartmentalization. 

Memorable Dialogue: Rudolf takes his son for a horseback ride through the woods. As the sounds of the Auschwitz camp creep into the scene, Rudolf points something out to the boy: “Do you hear that? It’s a bittern. A Eurasian gray heron.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Zone of Interests opens with a black screen and an ambient-music overture, functioning as a palate cleanser for what we’re about to see: A family going about its daily business. Boys play with toy soldiers, the nanny sits with her head in her hands as the baby wails in the wee hours, women chat over tea, a father reads his daughters a bedtime story. But one of the boys wears the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The sound of furnaces belching smoke and flame have awakened the child. The women casually discuss acquiring a dress from a “Jewess.” The story is Hansel and Gretel , and we specifically hear the part about the children pushing the witch into the oven.

Sometimes, we have to block out troublesome thoughts just to get through the workday and put dinner on the table and get the kids to bed. But the Hoss family is a different story. The children are collateral damage, while the adults function on a different level, especially Hedwig. While her husband ventures to the other side of the fence daily, she doesn’t, and prompts us to wonder whether complicity or indifference is worse. Most people get used to the best and worst of new surroundings; having acclimated to living in boiling water, Rudolf and Hedwig have become truly inhuman. Cue a crushingly prosaic scene: Rudolf makes a phone call, dictating a memo to camp workers. He wants them to please be conscious of not destroying the lilac bushes while picking flowers. We recognize the crass irony of the moment. Does he?

Glazer never shows us what happens on the other side of the fence. He doesn’t have to – we’ve seen it in Schindler’s List , Life is Beautiful , Son of Saul and others. In this film, though, the idea that what’s in our imagination is more terrifying than what we witness firsthand holds true as ever. The cinematography functions as a harsh staredown, as if the camera is trying to will its subjects to recognize reality, to self-reflect. The director tells parallel stories: The one we see, a quasi-observational family drama, austere and unblinking. And the one we hear, a horror story and condemnation of these characters (for this reason, the film is nominated for a best sound Oscar). These narratives intersect so frequently in our minds, because we’re not evil, and we try to will it to happen to Hedwig and Rudolf, perhaps because we value redemption stories, even when there are none.

Not all of the film is chillingly astringent. Glazer deviates from the static camera/natural light formality in a few scenes depicting Polish Jews whose faces go largely unseen: A girl, shot with reverse-negative photography, hides apples for starving prisoners; a lament played on a piano is subject to subtitles, instrumental music translated into words; a late-film sequence flash-forwards to present-day Auschwitz. History passes judgment. Not all is hopeless, and not all is forgotten. 

Our Call: The Zone of Interest is an exceptional film, and a difficult one to endure. The most vital stories are so often that way. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, a choice that cannot be made.

Now streaming on:

I sometimes ask myself what I would do if I were faced with an inescapable death. I know I will die someday; that is in the nature of things. But to be plucked from life and exterminated by a malevolent human machine is not natural. In a death camp, would I passively await the end? Would I seek accommodation for myself? Would I work to resist, however hopelessly?

"The Grey Zone" begins with the fact that the Nazis employed groups of Jewish prisoners to do much of the hard physical work of extermination. They led victims into gas chambers, fed their bodies into incinerators, shoveled up their ashes and disposed of them. For this work, they were paid with privileges: food, tobacco, wine and medicines plundered from the dead, and above all, perhaps a few more months of life.

It was rumored that Russian soldiers were a few months from reaching the camps and liberating them. If I could save my life by bargaining for those months, would that be wrong? It would be the wrong choice from a standpoint of objective morality; I should not collaborate in murder. Yet as I await a certain fate in despair, can I be blamed for attempting a bargain with destiny?

The central characters in "The Grey Zone" have accepted the Nazi deal at Auschwitz and labor as exterminators. They usher their fellow Jews into the gas chambers, tell them to place their clothing on numbered pegs, lie to them to remember the numbers for after their "shower." One Jew has a better job. This is Dr. Miklos Nyiszli ( Allan Corduner ), a surgeon highly prized by the monstrous Josef Mengele for carrying out medical "experiments." His guard is an SS officer named Muhsfeldt ( Harvey Keitel ). Nyiszli values his position, which includes an indefinite stay of execution and even the lives of his wife and daughter. Muhsfeldt values his, which brings him prestige in the service of Mengele. The two men have something in common.

The others are involved in a plot to steal gunpowder from a nearby munitions factory. They have weapons smuggled into them by members of the Polish resistance movement. They hope to blow up one or more of the crematoriums at Auschwitz, limiting the efficiency and speed of the death process. They're collaborating with women at the factory. Contraband is smuggled in with dead bodies. They hope to act soon.

This much is based on fact, as recorded in a postwar memoir by Nyiszli. The crucial element in the plot, however, was created by Nelson's screenplay. One day, hauling out the dead bodies from a gas chamber, Hoffman ( David Arquette ) discovers a young girl who has survived huddled beneath a pile of bodies. He carries her out as if she were dead, hides her and summons Nyiszli, who returns her to consciousness. Now the leader of the group, Schlermer ( Daniel Benzali ), is faced with a dilemma. Hiding the girl could jeopardize the entire sabotage operation.

But what else can they do? If they betray her, they kill her as personally as if they had pulled a trigger. They could no longer rationalize that they are only carrying out secondary tasks for the actual murderers. Muhsfeldt, who discovers the girl, agrees not to betray the secret -- in return for information, and perhaps in small part because he, too, cannot resolve the dilemma of one individual girl who chance has set aside from a collective fate.

Tim Blake Nelson's film presents this story with straightforward realism. He constructed a nearly scale-model duplicate of Auschwitz in Poland and brings to the crematorium scenes a sense of the forges of hell. His cast, mostly American apart from Corduner, includes not only Keitel and Arquette but Michael Stuhlbarg , Steve Buscemi , Mira Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne . Apart from Keitel, they use non-German accents. Probably just as well.

Nelson's dialogue deserves attention. It's not unadorned realism, but a flat back-and-forth stylized directness that at times rather reminded me of Mamet. As often in Mamet, the undertone is a sort of patient explaining of the obvious. This approach is useful in scenes where the characters are discussing the moral implications of their situation. These discussions aren't theoretical but bear immediate practical results. They aren't discussing what "one" should do in "such" a situation, but what they must do in the case of this particular sad-eyed young girl standing before them. Then there's a striking exchange between Nyiszli and Muhsfeldt, in which they discuss the doctor's situation and Muhsfeldt's position of some power in the camp. This conversation is almost in code, each clearly implying which neither is willing to state aloud.

The physical production, always convincing, never shows off its extent. There are repeated shots of the crematorium smokestacks, the plumes of black smoke by day joined by visible flames at night. These shots reopen the persistent question: What did the nearby Poles think was happening in those camps? Trainloads of humans went in, and smoke emerged. Well, some Poles risked their lives in the resistance. Others sheltered Jews in their homes. Most knew and did nothing. All over the Earth, no population is outstanding for its moral courage. That's one reason the moral math of "The Grey Zone" is so sobering.

To accompany the plumes of smoke, there is a persistent very low- level roar on the soundtrack during many scenes. In the ovens, the work continues 24 hours a day, its results hauled away in truckloads of ashes, some of the Jewish laborers sitting on them. In the incineration process, there is no conveyor belt to distance the workers from the flames. Sometimes they shove in someone they know. Soon it will be their turn.

Tim Blake Nelson , is primarily known as an actor (" O Brother, Where Art Thou? ," " Minority Report ," " Syriana "). This was his fourth feature as a director. If he only directed, he would be more recognizable as a leading contemporary filmmaker, because his credits are so notable. " Eye of God " (1997) stars Martha Plimpton as a bored woman who enters into correspondence with a prisoner ( Kevin Anderson ). They marry, and her misery increases. " O " (2001) transposes the story of Shakespeare's "Othello" to a high school in the South. " Leaves of Grass " (2009), my favorite film at Toronto 2009, stars Edward Norton in a dual role as twins, one an Oklahoma marijuana grower, the other a professor of philosophy at Brown. All of the scripts, except for "O," were originals by Nelson. They are united by the close observation of situations where one character comes from outside the conventional world of the film.

"The Grey Zone" ends with a narration observing that the bodies of the dead are turned into ashes of bones, gases and vapor, and a fine, invisible gray dust that settles everywhere and goes into lungs; they become so accustomed to it they lose the cough reflex. Thus do the living and the dead intermingle. I believe Tim Blake Nelson is suggesting that dust rises from many flames all over the world, and we breathe it today.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

The Grey Zone (2002)

Rated R For Strong Holocaust Violence, Nudity and Language

108 minutes

David Arquette as Hoffman

Daniel Benzali as Schlermer

Steve Buscemi as Abramowics

David Chandler as Rosenthal

Allan Corduner as Dr. Nyiszli

Harvey Keitel as Muhsfeldt

Natasha Lyonne as Rosa

Mira Sorvino as Dina

Written and Directed by

• Tim Blake Nelson

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From 'Anyone But You' to 'Rebel Moon 2,' here are 15 movies you need to stream right now

They say April showers bring May flowers. This month also unloads a deluge of movies to watch at home.

Netflix, Amazon's Prime Video, Peacock, Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and others have a spring fiesta of streaming options for film lovers of all tastes, from breezy romantic comedies to bone-chilling horror. There are recent theatrical releases, like an acclaimed Oscar-nominated Holocaust drama and one of the most Disney-fied Disney movies ever , but also original flicks such as Zack Snyder's latest sci-fi epic and a Sundance Film Festival documentary about politically savvy teen girls.

Here are 15 notable new movies you can stream right now:

'Anyone But You'

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'Drive-Away Dolls'

Margaret Qualley  and Geraldine Viswanathan co-star in director Ethan Coen's gonzo crime comedy as lesbian pals needing a change of pace who wind up behind the wheel of a rental car with a mysterious briefcase in the trunk. What unfurls is a noir-spattered road trip full of sex toys, decapitated heads and dimwitted goons.

Where to watch: Peacock .

'Drive-Away Dolls' review: Talented cast steers a crime comedy with sex toys and absurdity

'Girls State'

Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss' compelling follow-up to 2020's " Boys State " centers on teenage Missouri girls placed in competing political parties who create a mock state government. Abortion is a hot-button issue in the proceedings, which include a competitive gubernatorial race and an investigation into Girls State itself.

Where to watch: Apple TV+.

'The Greatest Hits'

The car accident that killed her boyfriend (David Corenswet) left Harriet (Lucy Boynton) with head trauma and the ability to time-travel to a past moment with him when she hears certain songs. But obsessively searching for the right tune to save him in the past might cost her a new chance at romance in the present of this intriguing but overly earnest drama.

Where to watch: Hulu .

'Late Night With the Devil'

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Where to watch: Shudder , AMC+ .

'Lisa Frankenstein'

A horror rom-com about reanimated undead love and body-robbing shenanigans, "Lisa" is a playful and bloody teen-movie reimagining of the "Frankenstein" mythos . Kathryn Newton plays a 1980s goth girl and Cole Sprouse is a Victorian corpse resurrected amid lively characters and clever, sardonic dialogue.

'Frankenstein' forever: 'Lisa Frankenstein,' Oscar fave 'Poor Things' reclaim Mary Shelley's feminist mythos

'Migration'

In the animated comedy, Mack (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) is the overprotective dad of a duck family who reluctantly agrees to a Jamaican getaway with his wife (Elizabeth Banks) and kids. However, they get sidetracked and wind up in New York City, where they meet a streetwise pigeon (Awkwafina) and a vicious chef.

Rudy Mancuso co-writes, directs and stars in this delightfully clever romantic comedy as a creative New Jersey man with synesthesia, experiencing melodies and rhythms around him in extraordinary fashion. It exacerbates problems with an ex (Francesca Reale) yet fascinates a new love interest (Camila Mendes).

Where to watch: Prime Video .

'Rebel Moon − Part Two: The Scargiver'

Do you live for slow-motion scenes of people harvesting grain? Then director Zack Snyder has the sci-fi sequel for you. The first "Rebel Moon" was derivative and the second one is just dull, with ex-warrior Kora (Sofia Boutella) leading a band of underdogs and farmers against the invading army of the villainous Imperium.

'The Stranger'

So, yeah, Quibi turned out to be pretty much a streaming disaster. Still, the content was pretty good and is now finding new homes as real movies, not a piecemeal experiment: Director Veena Sud's thriller ratchets up the suspense with Maika Monroe playing a rideshare driver and Dane DeHaan as the creepiest passenger ever.

'Talk to Me'

The best horror movie of last year was this haunting Australian indie chiller that introduced a new top-tier scream queen, Sophie Wilde, and a memorable scary-movie artifact: a mysterious embalmed hand that teens use to livestream freaky possessions that, of course, go terrifyingly awry.

Where to watch: Paramount+ .

A tune-filled, big-hearted storybook fantasy that's chock-full of Disney references. The animated musical features Ariana DeBose as an idealistic youngster who runs afoul of her kingdom's narcissistic ruler (Chris Pine) and befriends an energetic star to help rescue her people's wishes.

Where to watch: Disney+ .

'The Zone of Interest'

Director Jonathan Glazer 's best picture nominee centers on a German family going about their daily business. This banality, though, happens next door to Auschwitz, where gunshots, screams and the industrial sounds of ovens are the unnerving soundtrack that the characters ignore but you simply can't in this disturbing yet essential Holocaust drama.

Where to watch: Max .

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