The Zone of Interest
Academy Award × 2
Rent/Purchase
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.
What critics thought
Jonathan Glazer's film earns near-universal critical admiration for its rigorous, dispassionate approach — placing the Höss family's domestic routines directly beside the machinery of Auschwitz and letting the horror accumulate through sound design and framing rather than direct depiction. The main fault line in reviews runs between those who find the formal austerity devastating in its restraint and those, particularly some European critics, who see it as mannered, monotonous, and ultimately self-defeating — a conceptual exercise that runs dry before it earns its ambitions.
“devastating Holocaust drama like no other, which demonstrates with startling effectiveness [director Jonathan Glazer]'s unerring control of tonal and visual storytelling”
David Rooney·The Hollywood Reporter
“Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane – by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror”
Raphael Abraham·Financial Times
“a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste”
Peter Bradshaw·The Guardian
“The problem is not only the weakness of (the film's) formal lurches, which are much more derisory than those of Under The Skin, and remain here at the stage of mannerisms (why dispense them in such a furtive manner, if not to frustrate needlessly?). It's also that this fantastic idea of off-camera poisoning the frame without ever showing the forbidden image ends up running empty and looking at itself.”
Cahiers du Cinéma
“Through painstaking framing and sound design, its horrors gnaw at the edge of every shot.”
Robbie Collin·The Daily Telegraph
Genres
Drama, History
Cast & Crew
DirectorJonathan Glazer
StarringChristian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier
ComposerMica Levi
The Zone of Interest
Academy Award × 2
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.
What critics thought
Jonathan Glazer's film earns near-universal critical admiration for its rigorous, dispassionate approach — placing the Höss family's domestic routines directly beside the machinery of Auschwitz and letting the horror accumulate through sound design and framing rather than direct depiction. The main fault line in reviews runs between those who find the formal austerity devastating in its restraint and those, particularly some European critics, who see it as mannered, monotonous, and ultimately self-defeating — a conceptual exercise that runs dry before it earns its ambitions.
“devastating Holocaust drama like no other, which demonstrates with startling effectiveness [director Jonathan Glazer]'s unerring control of tonal and visual storytelling”
David Rooney·The Hollywood Reporter
“Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane – by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror”
Raphael Abraham·Financial Times
“a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste”
Peter Bradshaw·The Guardian
“The problem is not only the weakness of (the film's) formal lurches, which are much more derisory than those of Under The Skin, and remain here at the stage of mannerisms (why dispense them in such a furtive manner, if not to frustrate needlessly?). It's also that this fantastic idea of off-camera poisoning the frame without ever showing the forbidden image ends up running empty and looking at itself.”
Cahiers du Cinéma
“Through painstaking framing and sound design, its horrors gnaw at the edge of every shot.”
Robbie Collin·The Daily Telegraph
Genres
Drama, History
Cast & Crew
DirectorJonathan Glazer
StarringChristian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier
ComposerMica Levi
Rent/Purchase