"THE ZONE OF INTEREST's coup de grâce is never showing any activity within Auschwitz itself, allowing only the sounds of the camp to be a constant, nerve-racking presence. Woodpecker or machine gun? Crying baby or dying woman? The horrors of the camp are utterly ignored by the family as we, the audience, can think of nothing else. It is a brilliant tactic, this brazen display of indifference and complicity, because it pointedly reflects our own." Josh Kupecki, The Austin Chronicle (2024)

Rudolf, Hedwig und ihre Familie leben den perfekten Vorstadttraum in einem gepflegten Haus mit großem Garten. Doch hinter der Mauer der idyllischen Oase sind die Geräusche des industrialisierten Massenmords zu hören – denn Rudolf Höss ist der Kommandant von Auschwitz.
In seinem kühnen, formal herausragenden Film verschiebt Jonathan Glazer die üblichen Tropen des Holocaust-Dramas und zeigt das banale Leben der privilegierten Henker und ihrer Helfer:innen, die von dem Massenmord profitieren, während sie sich in bürgerlicher Verleugnung hermetisch davon abriegeln.

Regisseur und Drehbuchautor Jonathan Glazer (UNDER THE SKIN – TÖDLICHE VERFÜHRUNG, THE FALL) ließ sich für den Film von dem gleichnamigen Buch des verstorbenen Autoren Martin Amis inspirieren. Der bei seiner Premiere in Cannes umjubelte Film gilt als einer der Anwärter für den Oscar als bester fremdsprachiger Film. Rudolf Höß wird portraitiert von Christian Friedel ("Das weiße Band"). In der Rolle von Höß' Frau Hedwig brilliert Sandra Hüller ("Anatomie eines Falls", "Toni Erdmann").

"Newly arrived at his post, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss is mild-mannered and industrious. He works hard to provide for his family: five children and wife Hedwig, who is setting up their new house, managing the staff and servants. The children play games. In the background, over their fence, black smoke ascends and there is an omnipresent aural cacophony.
Historical atrocities have been examined on the screen innumerable times but not like this. The filmmaking gaze is calm, the natural beauty of the Polish countryside captured directly without artificial lighting. Yet, as in filmmaker Jonathan Glazer's previous film "Under the Skin", there is something unsettling, even alien, in what we see.
With a fascinating cinematographic setup in which cameras were placed around the labyrinthine house to capture each room’s activities without the director’s physical presence, like a security camera system. With regular Glazer collaborator Mica Levi’s stirring, other-worldly score, the film is as much an ambient experience as a narrative piece of cinema.
Loosely based on the book by Martin Amis, this Cannes Grand Prix-winner depicts a heinous chapter of history but is ultimately about compartmentalisation, probing how life can be lived with such horror just a hair’s breadth out of sight." Michelle Carey, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024

"In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality. It's summer in the mid-1940s, and a German family merrily idles by a river. Father Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and mother Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tuck their kids in bed at night. They entertain family and guests in their vast backyard garden on the weekends. In the mornings, she oversees chores with a cadre of housekeepers and cooks; he goes to work as head Commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Their domestic life is paradisiacal. Yet over the wall abutting their home, we can see smokestacks, and at night we hear screams and occasional gunshots. Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity, filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi." The New York Film Festival 2023