The Zone of Interest: A Holocaust movie with a message for our moment.

Some movies start by telling you how to watch them. In the year of Schindler’s List, Jean-Luc Godard turned down an award from the New York Film Critics Circle on the grounds that he had failed as a filmmaker, offering as proof his inability to “prevent M. Spielberg from rebuilding Auschwitz.” The impulse to add reenactment to the heap of historical documentation, much of it collected by Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, is an understandable one, but it’s hard to feel entirely at ease with the application of conventional cinematic techniques, the mechanics of suspense and special effects, to the depiction of such obscenity. “The important aspect was not to judge,” explained cinematographer Łukasz Żal, “not to make any decisions you would usually make.” The Hösses are less protagonists than they are historical artifacts, leaving us to glean from external data that, for example, the woman who shows up to stay in the family’s spare room is Hedwig’s mother, who leaves without notice after she realizes that her bedroom window is bathed at night in the glow of Auschwitz’s ovens. The terrified-looking women who act as her servants, she explains to a friend, are simply local girls: “The Jews are all on the other side of the wall.” We know that the Höss family’s carefully compartmentalized life is a lie—and Glazer shows us that they know it too. Hedwig’s casual chatter with her girlfriends includes references to the Jews whose belongings they pounced on when the owners were hauled away, and when one of her servants makes a minor infraction, Hedwig warns her with chilling equanimity that her husband “would spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” Their sons play a cheerful game of hide-and-seek, but when one hides in the family greenhouse, the other holds the door shut and mimics the hissing of a gas chamber.