Two final shows - February 24 - 25:

Nominated for 5 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound

Adapted from a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, the film centers on the domestic life of Rudolph & Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller & Christian Friedel). Scene by scene, we watch as if through surveillance cameras as they go about their daily routines. They host family. They chat about their vacations. They go on picnics. At night, we watch through a thermal lens as their Jewish maid hides apples around the camp for prisoners to find.

Rather than asking us to empathize with the family, The Zone of Interest questions what they know, and to what extent they should be held responsible. While Rudolph is involved in Auschwitz’s administration, Hedwig’s and her children’s complicity is less direct. At one point, she tries on a luxurious fur coat stolen from a murdered woman, and in another scene, the couple’s oldest son uses a flashlight to examine false teeth pried from the mouths of Jews killed in the gas chambers. Through its focus on the normalization of life around unfathomable horrors, the movie confronts us with the mundane and passive reality of complicity and asks us not to look away. This happened once and can happen again, we’re reminded.  At what point did they stop feeling shock? How could anyone sleep through this? And how can we?

(UK, Poland, US / 2023 / Directed by Jonathan Glazer)
PG-13 / 1 hr 45 mins