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Reviews

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair:

The British writer-director Jonathan Glazer begins his new film, The Zone of Interest, with a howling void… it feels as if we are descending to somewhere, quite possibly hell.

Rory O'Connor, The Film Stage:

In The Zone of Interest a commander, his wife, and their four children live a life of bucolic bliss… so why, you begin to wonder, is the light so dim? Why do these people not seem to mind when the dogs bark at night? And why do those barks sometimes sound like screams?

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair:

[The film] is set at Auschwitz. Or just outside it, at the home of the camp’s longest serving commandant, Rudolf Höss, and in the surrounding countryside.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter:

[The] juxtaposition seems the very essence of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” perfectly captured in the cast’s naturalistic performances.

Alissa Wilkinson, Vox:

[Look at the movie] as a sidelong horror-film adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, one that goes way beyond that book’s well-worn idea of the “banality of evil.”

That phrase… furnishes most people’s entire Arendt knowledge base: the idea that evil presents itself not as a devil with horns and a pitchfork, but in seemingly egoless, “mediocre” men… who carry out unspeakable atrocities.

David Fear, Rolling Stone:

Glazer has perfected a sort of subzero-temp formalism that both attracts and repels viewers looking for familiar narrative toeholds.

Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com:

Composer Mica Levi’s foreboding score, which can be guttural and dirty in infrared scenes… participates in the dichotomy of polishing and revealing.

Bilge Ebiri, Vulture:

His film is so psychologically searing it borders on the unwatchable.