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There’s no way to communicate the true tragedy or monstrousness of a camp where the Nazi regime killed more than 1 million people. The scale of the human catastrophe sets in not because it’s represented, but because the characters don’t seem to notice it at all. But by taking away the spectacle of violence, Glazer’s film shows another side of one of history’s greatest atrocities. No matter how carefully or truly it’s shown, the artifice eventually shows through, and the sense of fiction sets in. There’s a limit to the power of depicting violence on screen. The Zone of Interest’s effectiveness is drawn from all this contradiction. At one point, when Rudolf’s wife is trying out a new lipstick, found inside the pocket of a new fur coat delivered to her straight from the camp, we hear the sound of someone being whipped. Those sounds are never used to emphasize individual events in the characters’ lives they’re entirely unrelated. The whir and drone of machinery underscores some of the film’s quietest moments of dialogue, while gunshots and screams punctuate and underscore characters’ conversations. Death and its noises are ever-present but never acknowledged, shrouding the nearly meaningless events on the screen. They’re like a thick fog that permeates the family’s weightless domestic concerns, making the evil they’re complicit in inescapable. We don’t see the camp, but the sounds of it are all-encompassing, blaring just beneath the everyday sounds in the rest of the movie. The atrocities of the Holocaust surround the film, just like they surround the family. It’s a difficult and arguably dangerous approach, but Glazer handles it with care, never letting viewers forget what’s happening nearby. The knowledge that the audience carries about the Holocaust gives meaning to the things we don’t see play out. But Glazer’s carefully measured detachment lets the situation speak for itself. And it’s true that Glazer’s film relies heavily on extratextual knowledge and awareness to carry viewers’ understanding of the events actually seen on screen. This approach may sound like it sidelines the tragedy and horror of the Holocaust, centering the story on the culprits rather than the victims. Rudolf makes a point of taking his boots off outside and letting a maid wash the blood off them, rather than tracking it inside his home. Glazer’s camera never goes inside the camp, or shows the prisoners huddled there, or observes their actual fates.

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This is a decidedly different kind of Holocaust movie than almost any ever made. Meanwhile, the walls of the concentration camp, with its horrible sounds and billowing smoke, are close behind them. Höss’ (Sandra Hüller) carefully curated garden. The movie focuses on how they build their life on their small estate, with its fancy house and Mrs.

The Zone of Interest is set mere feet from the walls of Auschwitz, at the home of commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family. The effect, if you can stomach it, is a film that depicts the evils at the heart of the Holocaust as clearly and plainly as any movie ever has. The film seems implicitly obsessed with the question of what it really meant to be complicit in the worst crimes of the Nazi war machine. It’s also one of its best and most essential.

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The Zone of Interest, the new film from Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer, is one of 2023’s most difficult films.