Jonathan Glazer’s latest film The Zone of Interest immediately drags you into its aura.

More than two minutes of black screen, accented by the stereo-panning synths of composer Mica Levi. The darkness encapsulates the space, tuning the audience into one frequency. It quite literally creates a zone.

Glazer’s film functions on this idea of zones, of physical zones and metaphysical ones. We follow Nazi commandant Rudolf Hoss and his family in their new home, situated right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The unremarkable acts of domestic stability in their household are cordoned off from the grotesque horrors beyond the wall.

These horrors are never visualised directly in the film, and Hoss and his family never receive moral judgement. The tone is flat, languid, measured. It’s another film based on the Holocaust to receive the label of ‘anti-Schindler’s List’, owing to its lack of pathos and emotional direction in contrast to Spielberg’s film. Yet The Zone of Interest is incredibly impactful, perhaps more so, speaking to the cruelty of the human spirit in difficult ways rarely seen in commercial cinema. The film communicates through its form, leaving few answers in its narrative and dialogue.

This conception of zones, of the different experiences of space, is reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker,........

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