Rudolf and Hedwig Höss are a couple who “strive to build a dream life for their family”, as Zone of Interest’s official synopsis goes. In the film, we watch the mundane patterns of their lives: the children being sent off to school, the family sitting down to meals, Hedwig tending her garden and Rudolf fishing. However, Rudolf Höss is not any man, he is the commandant of Auschwitz and these scenes of domesticity take place in a house bordering the camp.

You never see any physical violence in Zone of Interest but it is always there pushing in on the periphery of frames, its sounds humming deeply under everything.

Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” is wrought powerfully in this film that envisages the lives of these real people. The Hösses are no evil geniuses – they are quite boring actually. They commit evil because they have been ordered to and they do so without introspection, awareness or care. They are, in their opinion, simply living and living well.

Zone of Interest is a deeply unnerving film. It’s not the Nazi uniforms that are the most affecting but the small details that represent the horror. The bag of silk undergarments carelessly thrown upon the table and offered to the family’s servants. The ashes used to make the Edenic walled-in garden bloom. The water turning red as Rudolf’s boots are cleaned. The sound of shots and the near-constant mechanical drone of what I assume is the crematoriums coming from the near distance.

I stayed up late the night I saw........

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