The Zone of Interest review: A hellish, daring spin on more traditional Holocaust movies

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. 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. First conceived during the 1960 trial of Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer and one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, the term views the enactment of such unspeakable crimes through a lens of “sheer thoughtlessness” – that men like Eichmann and Hoss hid their evil beneath ordinary turns of phrase, mindless action, and quotidian bureaucracy. Huller’s intelligently pitched performance allows Hedwig’s mock nonchalance to crumble for a moment when she tells the Jewish woman who works in her home that she could “have my husband spread your ashes” across the countryside. Fortress of delusion: Nazi children play in the garden of Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ It’s a tidy home, rendered uncanny and hostile by Łukasz Żal’s cinematography.