Review: ‘The Zone of Interest,’ a masterpiece set next door to Auschwitz, gets under the skin

What does a Nazi do on his day off? Christian Friedel in the movie “The Zone of Interest.” By this point, your mind may have already summoned the words “the banality of evil,” the immortal phrase that Hannah Arendt coined in the 1960s when writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of Höss’ Third Reich associates. The expression was much bandied about by critics after “The Zone of Interest” premiered and won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Hedwig, far from denying anything, seems to have long ago accepted the conditions of her family’s wealth and comfort, none of which are lost on her as she shows off her garden to her visiting mother and proudly proclaims herself the “Queen of Auschwitz.” That garden is in some ways crucial to unlocking “The Zone of Interest.” Metaphors may have no place at a concentration camp, but it’s hard to look at this beautiful enclosed space and not see it, perversely, as the most despoiled of Edens. An image from the movie “The Zone of Interest.” That we never see those murders — the bloodstains on Rudolf’s boots are as close as we get — renders Friedel’s performance all the more galvanizing in its restraint, a restraint that the camera echoes by keeping its distance from the actors, registering body language as much as expression.