The Zone of Interest

Glazer takes a meticulously forensic approach to the pair, but it could never be said he’s putting them under a microscope. Far from it. He’s determined to keep them at a distance, perhaps afraid that a single close-up might taint the whole exercise.

It is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking from the opening credits to the closing ones.

Jonathan Glazer deliberately avoids the most familiar horrors of the Holocaust to show a further layer of inhumanity.

I don't think this is the banality of evil. I think it's the kind of screaming silent horror of indifference or callousness.

I left it shaken and stricken; it stayed with me, stubbornly, over the months that followed.

Taking loose inspiration from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis, director Jonathan Glazer demonstrates Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory at work.

Despite my feelings on this feature, the film itself is great and really emphasizes the cruelty of the Holocaust even though nothing technically happens on screen, a well-intentioned decision by the filmmakers.

Rather than show fascination even as a criticism of the central characters, Glazer renders the fascists as flat, dull objects.

The brutal hook of the film is in how it demonstrates the ease in which people, given the right circumstances, can become complicit in evil.

Glazer’s film terrifies not because of what’s on screen but because of what happens off screen.