Reaction Shots

In Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest , the Holocaust is taking place literally over the garden walls. Auschwitz is Rudolf Höss's next door neighbor, but you wouldn't know it from the normality of routine his family goes through. His wife is happy with their lot (both their social status and the land they live on), the kids go to school, there are backyard parties, and he goes to the office each day to continue fine-tuning the extinction of Jews and other undesirables as dictated by his boss. He also ensures that quotas are met and later we find he's due to be moved in a promotion over all the camps. This is how chillingly matter-of-fact Glazer's narrative is. If you remove the context, you would have a fairly typical and maybe even boring, domestic drama. You might even have some sympathy of both Höss and his wife and the disruption that a move might bring to the family. But their obliviousness to the very real evil that they are abetting and helping spread dem...