WHAT WOULD YOU tell your children if you lived next door to hell? While they ramble through their idyllic garden and live their perfect life, how would you explain the occasional screams of abject terror uttered by strangers, in the night, or the appearance of blood on your husband’s boots? How you answer your son’s questions about a collection of human teeth his dad has given him to play with? Would you speak about the mysterious ashy substance used to fertilise your paradise of a garden, which comes from next door? Or maybe even consider the provenance of the glorious fur coats and satin smalls that you get from time to time? These come, after all, from the suitcases or off the backs of murdered strangers. And you know that. This is the reality of the horrifying premise of Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, a snapshot of the life of one of the European Holocaust’s most terrifying perpetrators, Rudolf Höss who lived, with his wife and five young children next to Auschwitz extermination and concentration camp, in Poland, from 1940 until 1945 – while some 2000 hapless souls were being murdered, every hour.  

It’s a devastatingly subtle construct of a monstrously dissonant reality, but in many ways, this much-fêted film is compromised. The work is marketed with a one-line descriptor, and other than a bit of a narrative about how much Mrs Höss (Sandra Hüller) loves her house and garden, the work remains a one-liner. There are no huge moments of ghastly realisation here. There is no denouement; the final threads of the film are cold. An explanatory sentence on the screen to tell you what happens to these characters beyond the reach of the film itself, is necessary. It’s a standard tactic of bringing an historical fiction up to speed and into your awareness of its realness.   

Processed with an acid-hued harshness in its colouration, every still of this film forces you to slide your eyes beyond the displays of content domesticity and to the margins of the images, where you can see and hear the machinations of the world’s most horrifying death machine. During the time of Höss’s reign as the commandant of the concentration camp complex, well over 1 million people were exterminated. And in every still, there it is: Auschwitz. In its harsh greyness. With its barbed wire and ghastly gunshots. With trains arriving all the time. You can’t miss it.

The house next door to this horror, was a haven of order and homeliness, with a garden that contains all the most popular flowers of the time, herbs and a swimming pool with a slide, complete with five little children and a mischievous dog with a wagging tale. All of this is contained in the precis which markets the film. Effectively this means that the characters are cardboard cutouts.

Hüller, who you may have seen in Anatomy of a Fall last year, hold the work together. Her Hedwig Höss is the model wife and mother, who can do tea and gossip like the rest, but give her a side glance, if you’re a maid, and she will show how perfectly savvy she is about where her loyalties lie and what she can cause to happen to you. And your remains. She’s also, in one moment, the one character who you get to see as having the potential of three dimensionality in this work. There’s a nonsensical throwaway line about cows and an accordion, where Huller’s character laughs like a young girl, who still is capable of expressing joy.  

But then, there is the soundtrack. With a potent nod in the direction of Krzysztof Penderecki’s terrifying Auschwitz Oratorium of 1967, the soundtrack, like the visual track, subliminally contains the messy cacophony of an extermination camp, culminating in a piece of shrill and horrifying music at the end of the work that will chill you to the bone. And perhaps that is the edge of this work: so much of the barbaric horror perpetrated within the walls of Auschwitz is ineffable; expressing it in direct image or word would cheapen an understanding of its monstrosity.

This film is, however, far from a flawless understanding of a period in the history of the Jews that redefined them forever. It contains passing and unexplained references to the 19th century German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, and other shreds and threads of narrative that are left as red herrings, and that do not serve the story itself, with credibility or depth.

Having said that, this film could be easily read as a metaphor for how any society will secrete itself into a bubble and continue the robust business of living life, while it is committing genocide in the literal or metaphorical understanding of ‘the people next door’. It’s a slice of history where a people being murdered are referred to with nouns that strip them of their humanity, and efficiency in destroying them is discussed with the same banality that you would use to speak of clearing a drain of blockage. Indeed that level of banality, as coined by German political theorist Hannah Arendt, is the greatest terror of all.

• The Zone of Interest is directed by Jonathan Glazer and written by Martin Amis and Jonathan Glazer, based on Amis’s eponymous 2014 novel. With a cast headed by Nele Ahrensmeier, Max Beck, Anastazja Drobniak, Lilli Falk, Christian Friedel, Ralph Herforth, Daniel Holzberg, Sandra Hüller, Andrey Isaev, Johann Karthaus, Medusa Knopf, Zuzanna Kobiela, Imogen Kogge, Freya Kreutzkam, Wolfgang Lampl, Sascha Maaz, Cecylia Pekala, Stephanie Petrowitz, Julia Polaczek, Martyna Poznanski, Kalman Wilson, Luis Noah Witte and Ralf Zillmann, it is produced by Ewa Puszczynska and James Wilson and features creative input by Mica Levi (music), Lukasz Zal (cinematography), Paul Watts (editing), Simone Bär, Alexandra Montag and Jacqueline Rietz (casting), Chris Oddy (production design) and Malgorzata Karpiuk (costumes). In German and Yiddish with English subtitles, it released in South Africa on 2 February 2024.