Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest wants to be profound. It wants to chill your soul. It wants to make you sit silently in your seat afterward, contemplating the banality of evil and the horror of human detachment. And maybe it does all of that—for film students and arthouse masochists who enjoy being pummeled with static wide shots and industrial background noise for 105 minutes straight.
For the rest of us? It’s like being locked in a luxury IKEA showroom next to Auschwitz, where everyone pretends nothing’s happening outside while they garden, sunbathe, and passive-aggressively sip tea. It’s The Truman Show meets Schindler’s List as told by an anesthesiologist with a God complex and a grudge against pacing.
🏡 The Setup: Hell Has a Nice Lawn
Based on Martin Amis’ novel of the same name—though “based” might be generous—Glazer’s version turns the lens (and keeps it there… and there… and still there…) on the Höss family. That’s Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his clan, who live in a pristine house right next to the camp. Not metaphorically close. Literally next-door-neighbor-to-genocide close. You can almost hear the screams over the sound of sprinklers.
The film’s brilliance, according to critics and film circles with a collectively parched sense of humor, is its refusal to show any of the atrocities directly. Instead, we get visuals of mundane domestic life—a mother trying on dresses, children playing with the dog—while death hums in the background like a broken HVAC unit from hell.
It’s meant to be devastating. But after an hour of this, it becomes numbing. And not in a good, contemplative way. In a “Did my screen freeze or is Glazer still staring at that wall?” kind of way.
🎬 The Style: Art Film As Punishment
Glazer shoots the entire film with the kind of cold detachment usually reserved for Swedish tax videos. The camera never moves. Scenes play out from static, distanced angles, like you’re watching human behavior through a surveillance feed from purgatory. Which is likely the point—but that doesn’t make it any less tedious.
He’s so committed to the minimalist aesthetic that the movie often feels like a prank. You keep waiting for something, anything, to happen. But no, we’re just going to watch someone polish silverware while people are being murdered offscreen. Look—a tulip is blooming while a crematorium bell rings. Wow. Art.
It’s like Glazer dared himself to make the world’s quietest horror film. The result is a cinematic Rorschach test: if you see meaning, you’ll praise it as “haunting.” If you see boredom, you’ll check your watch and wonder if he filmed it all with a Ring doorbell camera.
🎭 The Performances: Stiff as Corpses
Christian Friedel plays Rudolf Höss with all the warmth of a taxidermy exhibit. He walks through the film like a man late for his own funeral, lips pursed, eyes blank, soul vacuum-sealed. It’s a calculated performance, sure, but also kind of like watching a desk lamp audition for American Psycho.
Sandra Hüller, fresh off being great in Anatomy of a Fall, plays his wife, Hedwig. And by “plays,” I mean “exists quietly in sundresses while doing light fascism.” She’s arguably the more chilling character—a woman so obsessed with her garden and household perfection that she could ignore the collapse of civilization five feet away as long as her gooseberries are ripe.
But neither of them are characters so much as furniture in a museum exhibit. They’re symbols. They’re ideas. They’re mannequins with accents. There’s no arc, no depth, no transformation. Just people quietly being awful while birds chirp and the air smells faintly of ash.
🎵 The Soundtrack: Satan’s Microwave
The sound design, for lack of a better word, is the most disturbing part of the film—and not always in the way Glazer probably intended. There’s no musical score to guide your emotions, only ambient noise: screams, gunshots, barking dogs, trains, and the kind of metallic drone that makes you wonder if your smoke detector is malfunctioning.
There are moments where the entire film goes pitch black and plays an ominous industrial rumble, like someone left their washing machine running in the ninth circle of hell. It’s supposed to represent the unseen horror. But it also feels like an intermission where your ears get punished for what your eyes have already suffered.
📚 The Themes: We Get It
The central thesis of The Zone of Interest is not subtle: Evil can be mundane. Atrocity doesn’t require overt monsters—it lives in denial, comfort, and freshly trimmed hedges.
Great. Got it. That idea is chilling. It’s important. It deserves to be told. The first time. Maybe even the second.
By the twentieth shot of Hedwig arranging flowers while smoke billows in the background and children laugh like nothing’s wrong, you’re screaming internally: “OKAY, JONATHAN, I GET IT. NOW MOVE THE DAMN CAMERA.”
But he never does. Because this isn’t about storytelling. It’s about aesthetic suffering. It’s about forcing the audience to feel the weight of history by making them sit still and stew in it like forgotten leftovers in a moral fridge.
🚪 The Ending: Now With Bonus Metaphor
In a final twist, Glazer gives us a jarring sequence involving modern-day Auschwitz employees—cleaning, mopping, sweeping the museum floors. It’s meant to bridge the past and present, to show that we live with this legacy.
It’s also the cinematic equivalent of a director walking onstage and yelling, “This is important, damn it!” into your popcorn. After all that restraint, he goes full college thesis, just in case someone missed the point.
🧼 Final Thoughts: Bleak and Bland
The Zone of Interest is a film with an essential message, buried beneath a mountain of stylistic pretension. It’s like being handed a handwritten note on the Holocaust, folded neatly inside a brick. And then being told to admire the brick for two hours while the note burns in the distance.
Yes, evil is boring. But did the movie have to be?
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 ambient screams
Watch it if you like your Holocaust films slow, static, and drenched in metaphorical fog. Otherwise, go read a book. Or stare at a beige wall—it’ll be more lively.
