Part historical drama, part horror, this film centers on the home and professional life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his family.
"Zone of Interest" is mostly set in a residential area adjacent to the camp. Höss and his wife, Hedwig, are proud of the home and gardens, and the "normal" life they have built directly adjacent to the site perhaps most iconic of the horrors of the Holocaust. Höss's job is also presented as that of a bureaucrat, days filled with detailed efficiency reports, construction schedules and budgets. The film sharply contrasts this ordinary life, and idyllic home, with the atrocities the viewer knows are being committed just on the other side of a wall in their backyard.
The film uses long, contemplative shots and minimal dialogue to create an uncanny sense of unease and tension. The sound design is outstanding. The sounds coming from the other side of the camp's walls, gunshots, screams, machinery, the trains, and, yes, the furnaces, are a constant background theme, day and night, to the mundane home life of the family.
"The Zone of Interest" is a remarkable and disturbing film, without a single direct image or scene of the operation of Auschwitz.
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