#although höss and hedwig seriously considered murder-suiciding the family after they heard hitler was dead

[cantsayidont]

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023): Extremely disquieting, politically pointed statement about bourgeoisie complicity in ongoing, monstrous evil, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer based on a Martin Amis novel about Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, whose family lives in comfort and comparative luxury in a big house nearby.

There's little plot per se — the biggest conflict in the story is Höss's wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) insisting on staying at Auschwitz with the children while he's reassigned to another camp, unwilling to relinquish her easy country lifestyle and Polish slaves even for a little while — and the film maintains a rigid and frosty emotional distance from its own narrative. (If you're not familiar with Höss's biography, the film makes no particular effort to fill you in.) Many scenes are filmed primarily in long shot, and always framed in ways that avoid ever letting the viewer get a good look at any of the characters. Similarly, the script only occasionally alludes to the war and the ongoing program of mass murder and enslavement in which Höss is participating (and which he regards as an interesting engineering problem as well as a career opportunity), although it's very clear that the characters, including the children, know exactly what's going on and are just fine with it: In a moment of frustration, Hedwig takes out her frustration on their terrified Polish house slave, casually warning the girl, "I could have my husband scatter your ashes over the fields of Babice."

The result is a discomfiting atmosphere of sustained, agonizing dramatic irony, full of tableaux of quietly playing children and SS officers indulging in fits of contextually absurd sentimentality about dogs, horses, and the pretty view, while remaining completely dispassionate about the staggering horror they're perpetrating and on which their families' pleasant little idyll is built. In very short order, you'll want to scream (and, if you have any human feeling at all, probably to see them all hanged), but the story withholds dramatic catharsis of any kind. There are no scenes of heroic resistance, no 11th-hour crises of conscience, no arrival of Allied liberation, and no assurance of postwar trial to restore moral order, just bland acceptance of overwhelming horror, which segues at the end to scenes of modern cleaning staff dusting and vacuuming the cremation furnaces as a museum exhibit. Brutal. VERDICT: As a political statement, it's acute and extremely timely; as a movie, it's best described as punishing — something you should see, but not something you'll want to revisit.