The Zone of Interest

Director: Jonathan Glazer

2023 / 105min / DCP

Hüller gives a spare, quietly chilling performance in Glazer’s austere and unsettling study of the banality of evil playing Hedwig Höss, the matriarch of a perfectly ordinary middle class German family of the mid-1940s, seen entertaining friends and family on evenings and weekends, after which Hedwig is left to mind the five children and tend to household affairs as husband Rudolf (Christian Friedel) heads to his job as commandant at Auschwitz, the occasional scream or gunshot doing little to interrupt the sense of domestic tranquility. A daring demystification of historical horror, in which offscreen space acquires a terrible foreboding weight.