The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is a film of incredible subtlety, one that deliberately withholds clarity to make the audience uneasy. If you go in without reading a synopsis, the experience becomes almost puzzle-like: the Hoss family is introduced as an idyllic, well-put-together household, their lives full of routine gestures and moments of domestic beauty. The only major clues that something is wrong are the barbed wire in the distance and the muffled but ever-present sounds of suffering that leak into the background.

The film's power lies in this gradual revelation. It allows events to unfold without explanation, leaving the audience to piece together their meaning—whether it's the grandmother's abrupt departure after being horrified by what she witnesses, or Rudolf Hoss's coercion of prisoners into sexual servitude. When the illusion finally cracks about halfway through, it is devastating. The mask of normality falls away: Rudolf is openly unfaithful, Hedwig clings to her life of comfort while violence props it up, and the children are being raised in an environment where brutality is normalized. The banality of evil is captured not through spectacle but through the casual rhythms of family life conducted in the shadow of atrocity.

It's a story rarely told in World War II cinema—less about the camps themselves than about those who built lives alongside them. And Glazer's choice to tell it this way feels both bold and unsettling.

That said, I left with reservations. For a film that thrives on understatement, the ending felt oddly inconclusive. Ambiguous conclusions can work when they leave a lingering question to wrestle with, but here the captain's retching followed by a flash forward to the present left me asking, that's it? Perhaps the intent is to remind us that the ghosts of Auschwitz live on in our world, and that the legacy of violence continues—but in execution, it didn't land with the profundity I hoped for. Maybe it's because the film leans on the audience's real-world knowledge of the Holocaust to supply meaning in a way that pure fiction cannot.

Even with that frustration, The Zone of Interest remains an arresting work—precisely because of how it refuses to explain itself. It's a film that builds unease through absence, and one that lingers not for what it shows, but for what it forces us to imagine.