Film adaptations of Martin Amis’s novels have never had cause to grow “tired of winning,” as Trump once put it. That is, until now. Loosely based on Amis’s 2014 novel and directed by Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest takes place in a concentration camp and is told exclusively from the Nazi perspective. Glazer takes the phrase “loose adaptation” and runs with it, disposing of Amis’s fictional trinity of monologues and setting his zone of interest squarely upon real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife, Hedwig, and their petty marital strife.
The novel’s singular achievement is to reveal the horror of the Holocaust by never showing it, keeping the prose a hairbreadth this side of genocide, and the film is equally novel, so to speak—Nazi children play against a background of muted gunshots and screams, smoke plumes brim over garden walls, and Jewish slaves deliver supplies without a flicker of Nazi eye contact. This backdrop makes events like Hedwig’s tantrum at Rudolf’s transfer—Auschwitz is their home, she’s just put in a garden, the children are well adjusted, how could they possibly leave?—especially sickening.
In a season of films epic in length and impregnability, The Zone of Interest is mesmerizingly succinct at under two hours. The Nazis are shown to be as human as we are—with careerist ambition, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses hauteur—and thus all the more monstrous. That the most heinous crime in human history was undertaken by bureaucratic mediocrities and shallow wives leaves one contemplating just how many degrees of separation might exist between us and them. Even the verdure is not safe from recrimination: Glazer makes the flowers look diabolically culpable for growing next to camp walls.
There are no spoilers to a Holocaust movie. The only people who might hold out hope for a surprise ending are “political commentators” such as Nick Fuentes and other anti-Semites Ye tall. Nor should it come as a shock that the film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on the day of Amis’s death, in May, fails in the one respect where only a novel could succeed: language.
In describing the excited thighs of the commandant’s secretly Jewish wife, Amis records the greatest phraselet in the English language, “glueyly asquirm.” Only Amis could pull off sensuality in a concentration camp, and to Glazer’s credit, the gorgeous inner monologues of effete Nazi officers are probably best left for the contemplation of the lamplight and armchair, not the theater. Even still, the film shares in the glow of Amis’s phraselet: it will glue you to your seat and make you squirm.
Vincenzo Barney is a New York–based writer
The Zone of Interest is in theaters now