The Zone of Interest (2023) review

Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children live in beautiful house right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II - she putters in the garden and tries on stolen articles of clothing, he puffs on a cigar while a smokestack ominously dumps black soot in the air, their kids swim in the river (before Rudolf realizes the water is contaminated) ... and then when Höss is set to be transferred to Oranienburg, Hedwig refuses to leave.  The sound design is fascinating (listen closely and you can hear trains, motorcycles, shouting, machine gun fire, etc.) but this stripped-down adaptation of the late Martin Amis' novel makes its point quite early and has little else creatively to offer, aside from scenes shot with a thermal camera of a girl giving food to the prisoners and a general nod and wink to Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," showing how a family can continue on with their daily business as horrific atrocities are committed only a few feet away (or undergo mental gymnastics to "justify" the exterminations).  Glazer does a sudden flash forward at the end that shows a janitorial crew tidying up the modern-day Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum ... if he's insinuating Höss and other members of the SS are essentially the "same" as custodians - thoughtlessly "doing a job" - I imagine there are several people who might take issue with that correlation.  Still, it's impressive for a feature to make me want to see every adult figure in it hanged (which later happened to the real Höss), so it has that going for it....