The Zone of Interest

“The Zone of Interest,” the brilliantly disquieting new movie from the English writer-director Jonathan Glazer, never brings us over that camp wall. It’s a horror film that keeps its horrors rigorously hidden from view. But while restrained in form and implications, “Zone” is never coy, and is surprisingly quick to disgorge its secrets. The camp is Auschwitz. The Nazi is Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), the camp’s longest-serving commandant. Glazer, drawing very loose inspiration from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis, confines his narrative focus to the period between 1943 and 1944, and he grounds his spare story in the everyday rhythms and meticulously researched details of the Hösses’ family life.

The quality of dread that he sustains over an eerie, exactingly precise 106 minutes stems from our disturbing realization of just how quotidian that life is. Here is a house so well run that the business of mass murder happening a stone’s throw away has been thoroughly, almost imperceptibly routinized. There’s a darkly funny early shot of Rudolf riding a horse from his yard up to the gates of Auschwitz, completing the world’s shortest, ghastliest commute. When he later blows out the candles on his birthday cake, surrounded by his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, “Anatomy of a Fall”), and their five children, you may not immediately notice the camp guard tower looming in the window behind him.

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. But not all banality is created equal — and not all evil is created equal, either. The specific achievement of this movie, recently named the best picture of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., is to explore evil without glamorizing it, and to transmute the mundane into something quietly mesmerizing.