Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
The Zone of Interest is a genuinely singular work — Jonathan Glazer's clinical, almost observational approach to depicting the Holocaust through the mundane domestic life of the Höss family next to Auschwitz is one of the most conceptually daring and morally confronting films in recent memory. The plot is deliberately uneventful in conventional terms, but that banality is precisely the point and executed with rare conviction. Acting from Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel is extraordinarily restrained and chilling. Cinematography is immaculate — static, surveillance-like framing with ambient sound design doing terrifying work. Novelty is exceptionally high: no film has approached this subject from quite this angle with this formal rigor. The ending, while powerful, is slightly more conventional in its epilogue structure (cutting to present-day Auschwitz cleaners), which lands with impact but feels slightly more expected compared to the film's otherwise radical restraint, preventing a full top mark there.