The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2023 (losing the Palme to Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall) and the Academy Awards for Best International Feature and Best Sound in 2024. Glazer's acceptance speech, in which he refused to use his Jewishness or the Holocaust to support what was happening in Gaza, was widely covered as one of the most morally precise political statements ever made at the ceremony.

The Höss family (Rudolf, the commandant of Auschwitz (Christian Friedel), and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, in the same Cannes year as her Anatomy of a Fall performance)) build a tasteful domestic life in a villa on the other side of the Auschwitz wall. Flowers, a swimming pool, children's birthday parties, and, always, the sound of the camp machinery next door, gunshots, train arrivals, screaming, the constant low rumble of crematoria. Łukasz Żal's photography keeps the camp itself almost entirely off-screen; Mica Levi's score is minimal and disturbing; Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn's sound design is the formal centre of the film, and the reason for the Best Sound Oscar.

Glazer adapted Martin Amis's 2014 novel of the same name, but reduced its narrative scaffolding almost to nothing. The film's structural insistence (that horror is the wallpaper, not the picture) became one of the most-discussed aesthetic choices of recent Holocaust cinema, alongside Son of Saul's shallow-focus Sonderkommando method.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most morally exact recent work of Holocaust cinema, and the rare film that earns the right to refuse representation. Glazer's speech alone makes this required viewing.