The Zone of Interest (2023)

Jonathan Glazer never takes his camera over the wall in The Zone of Interest, and some viewers will find that restraint harder to sit through than any image he could have shown. The year is 1943. Rudolf Höss runs Auschwitz and goes home every evening to a comfortable family house that shares a wall with the camp. His wife Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller, tends her garden and fights to keep the house when he’s transferred to Oranienburg. Weekends mean swimming and fishing with the kids. Everything that matters reaches you through sound, and Johnnie Burn’s sound design and Mica Levi’s score are why the film works. The days are deliberately flat and even, which can feel static, and a few critics called the formal choices more pose than purpose. Mostly, the restraint is the point. It holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. A 9.1 because it makes the ordinary routines around an atrocity the thing you can’t shake. $2,248 says the ordinary sounds of your own home, a door, a kettle, a dog, stay with you differently tonight.

What works: Glazer’s patient, distant camera and the relentless sound design make the family’s ordinary routine the most disturbing thing in the film, without a single graphic image.

What doesn’t: The flat, repetitive rhythm of the household’s days can feel static, and the film offers almost no conventional story to hold onto.

Who it’s for: Viewers ready for a quiet, demanding film about history that trusts them to listen closely and sit with what they hear.