The Zone of Interest review: Jonathan Glazer's haunting WW2 drama

The Zone of Interest will wreck you. Jonathan Glazer's movie, which initially premiered in December 2023 and has since been expanding to more areas, is a gut punch, showing how people are willing to turn a blind eye to horrors if it can benefit them, but how they are never truly gone and will haunt you one way or the other. Yet because it is so exquisitely made you will not be able to look away, drawn to the power of the images and message presented on the screen.

To put it simply, The Zone of Interest is one of the best movies of the year. While other movies dealing with dark and/or tough subject matters may be more entertaining (Killers of the Flower Moon) or enthralling to watch unfold (Oppenheimer), it is Glazer's decision to not mine the easy emotional moments and yet make sure the audience never forgets what is really going on that make The Zone of Interest so breathtaking.

Based on Martin Amis book of the same name, The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War 2, and his family, including his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children. The movie depicts them living in a house that is immediately adjacent to the camp.

Yet despite the proximity, the actual plot of The Zone of Interest has almost nothing to do with the concentration camp. Instead the primary focus of the characters are how they are living the life they always dreamt of having — a nice house, a beautiful garden, people waiting on them and respect from those around them. They never question why or how they came into this situation, but the movie never lets the audience forget. A wall surrounds the garden, with the camp right on the other side, its buildings hovering over the scene in nearly all instances. And if the building (or smoke stacks) aren't visible, the sound of gunshots and screams over this family playing in the garden without a care in the world fills the gap.

This is the first feature-length movie that Glazer has directed since 2013's sci-fi movie Under the Skin, but he has clearly not lost a step. Glazer's directing in The Zone of Interest has few equals in this or any year, firmly placing him as one of the premier directors working right now. Every choice he makes in this movie is unassailable.

While it is certainly Glazer's movie from beginning to end, Friedel and Hüller (who stars in another excellent 2023 movie, Anatomy of a Fall) manage from time to time to almost make you forget that the characters we are following are despicable Nazis who profited off the genocide of the Jewish people. But then again, if that feeling ever starts to creep up — like in The Zone of Interest ending — Glazer hits you with another brilliant choice to put everything back to its proper perspective.

We have seen movies that deal with the Holocaust before, but in most cases they attempt to show the humanity that managed to break through from this terrible moment in human history (Schindler's List) or give a direct look into the horrors (Son of Saul). But The Zone of Interest is here to remind us that there are those who will turn away from atrocities if it does not directly impact them, or worse, if it may benefit them, and it is on all of us to make sure that we don't let ourselves become numb or willfully ignorant in the face of injustice.

That is why The Zone of Interest is an experience worth watching. It will not be easy, but a similar theme with other movies from 2023, we must not turn a blind eye to our failings so we can be sure to never do them again.

The Zone of Interest is playing exclusively in US movie theaters. It releases in the UK on February 2.