The Zone of Interest achieves something previously impossible to convey except in books: the banality of Nazi evil. This is Eichmann in Suburbia.

The standard Holocaust film strategy has been to bombard viewers with the monstrosity of Hitler’s evil. In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer takes a controversial new approach: less is more.

To the long list of signature Holocaust films––Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, Schindler’s List––add The Zone of Interest, which I just experienced at the extraordinary Palm Springs International Film Festival. This tight, understated, Arbus-like art film––directed with remarkable precision by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast)––shows the twisted lengths that ordinary Germans went to carve out some personal lebensraum inside Hitler’s Inferno. This is tricky territory that can easily slide into the macabre. It requires consummate actors, who can bury their visceral disgust at the demonic proceedings next door to serve the big curated lie of love, order, and beauty. Shot using mostly hidden cameras with the director completely off-set, The Zone of Interest achieves something previously impossible to convey except in books: the banality of Nazi evil. This is Eichman in Suburbia.

The actor of the year (Anatomy of a Fall), the meticulous Sandra Hüller (Hedwig Höss)––sporting a strikingly realistic hausfrau gait and manner––is central to the sick pantomime. We see her tending her large, gated, and obsessively perfect garden, maintaining a punctiliously governed household with the aid of dutiful locals (one of whom is Jewish), preening over her greenhouse and pool that few German women of her WWII station possessed, and entertaining neighbor ladies with tales of stolen Jewish loot––a mink fur, dresses, lipstick––that she’s received courtesy of her Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant husband Rudolph Höss, played with evocative restraint by Christian Friedel (The White Ribbon). The looming tower of Auschwitz is always there beyond the backyard wall, a visible renunciation of post-war German and Polish revisionism: “We never knew.”

Rudolph and Hedwig know, as they strive to keep their five children in the dark amidst muffled screams, gunshots, dog barks, and the grinding engine of gas chambers, arriving trains, and incinerators, made doubly apocalyptic by Mica Levi’s haunting score and Johnnie Burn’s chilling sound design. We witness picnics, games by the pool, a birthday party, and even a trip to the river, cut short when Rudolph discovers Jewish remains floating in the stream, which are then assiduously washed off the moment he and the boys reach home.

Hedwig and Rudolph have a burning purpose behind their sordid complicity: to be the farmer-settlers of the East that the Fuhrer called on working-class Germans to become. “In the East lies our tomorrow,” writes one visitor in their guest book. As such, they need to clear away the brush of the rich and entitled that stands in the way of their ghastly manifest destiny. At night, Rudolph reads his children bedtime stories, including Hansel and Gretel, in which the witch (substitute “Der Jude”) is thrown in the gas oven for all her “horrible” deeds. The indoctrination runs deep. The domestication of denial is a 24/7 project.

But the ugly truth sneaks through despite the illusion of bucolic control: the older brother locks his younger brother in Hedwig’s greenhouse, mimicking the sound of poison gas; the newborn screams whenever the Auschwitz ovens light up; the blood on Rudolph’s boot must be furiously scrubbed away. Even Hedwig’s stolid mother deduces what’s up when she abruptly cuts her visit short due to coughing fits from ash in the air. Germans could tolerate the stench of evil when it was antiseptically sequestered far away, but not when it was too close to ignore. It takes an act of superhuman will, and centuries-old class and ethno-religious resentment, to remain unmoved by the sight, sound, and smell of The Holocaust’s pernicious proximity.

But Hedwig and Rudolph must summon that will because their social advancement and prosperity depend upon their acquiescence in it. After all, the ambitious Rudolph is not only the head of the Nazi’s primary extermination camp, he is about to be made head inspector of all Nazi extermination camps. Upon receiving that “prestigious” assignment, Rudolph tells Hedwig that he fantasizes about gassing the entire Nazi high command, confirming that, among Hitler’s willing executioners, it was really about class in the end.

Everyone in The Zone of Interest––a dehumanized Nazi term for the area surrounding a concentration camp––tries to maintain their zone of disinterest. Rudolph prefers to issue diabolical commands from the comfort of home rather than the brutal reality of work. When he and his colleagues talk about their grand designs for a new type of circular incinerator, they speak in the cold bureaucratic euphemisms of ”yield,” and “burn, cool, unload, reload.” Hedwig proudly says a friend calls her the "Queen of Auschwitz,” as if the term had zero sinister undertones.

But as the ash of incinerated humanity fertilizes Hedwig’s flower and vegetable garden, the evil next door slowly interpenetrates Hedwig and Rudolph’s leaky boundary system. Near the film’s end, the camera finds Rudolph alone on a Nazi staircase desperately trying to cough out the sickness. But he can’t. In his distress, he peers down a long hallway through a keyhole to the future museum that Auschwitz will become, its intrinsic horror covered up by the banality of tourism. As present-day workers position and tidy up the exhibits for another day of visitors, Rudolph foresees how humanity will inexorably sanitize his unspeakable deeds. His moment of self-realization now up––the world is thus, the Catholic commandant seems to conclude––he slowly and then hastily heads further down the staircase. Duty awaits!

In this extraordinary moment, Glazer moves us beyond the twisted social satire of Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogooth), and Ruben Ostlund (The Triangle of Sadness)––the towering trio of Euro Kino-sadism––to something timeless and profound, if not exactly enjoyable. The Zone of Interest is not just about the horror of National Socialism, but about how humans respond over time to all horror, right up to the present-day “social justice” justification for ghastly political violence in our land.

At a time when Woke college campuses and racial extortionists are adrift in “anti-Zionist” anti-Semitism, and as global support for the messianic terrorist group Hamas remains strong––even after their ghastly October 7 attacks on The Jewish Homeland––we desperately need Glazer’s subtle, honest, anti-entertainment on the ways humans compartmentalize evil.

A 50-state Claimscon survey of U.S. Millennials and Gen-Zers found that 48% could not name a single Nazi concentration camp. 63% did not know that six million Jews were massacred in the Holocaust, with over half of those believing that the toll was under two million. 19% of New York residents surveyed thought the Jews caused the Holocaust.

Shot on location at Auschwitz but eschewing the atrocity porn of most Holocaust films, The Zone of Interest is perhaps the garden-view antidote to this devastating and dangerous amnesia.