A24 has unveiled the trailer for Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” The German-language Holocaust drama tells a chilling story of real-life German SS officer Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who raised their children in a farmhouse next door to Auschwitz. The film premiered this year at Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix, the fest’s second most prestigious award.
Based loosely on Martin Amis’ 2014 book of the same name, “The Zone of Interest” stars Christian Friedel as Rudolf and Sandra Hüller as Hedwig, along with Daniel Holzberg, Ralph Herforth and Sascha Maaz. The film was shot entirely in Poland and Germany by award-winning cinematographer Łukasz Żal.
Variety’s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman called the film “chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope.” Gleiberman continued in his review, “’The Zone of Interest’ isn’t a portrait of the victims of the Holocaust. It’s a portrait of the perpetrators. Yet what hovers over every moment is a human monstrousness that’s at once inflicted and repressed. The film’s haunting subject is the compartmentalization of evil.”
Glazer, who previously directed the 2013 sci-fi feature “Under the Skin,” centered the film around the Höss family as a way to depict the human capacity for evil. During a press conference at Cannes, Glazer said, “The great crime and tragedy is that human beings did this to other human beings. It’s very convenient to distance ourselves from them as much as we can, because we think we don’t behave that way, but we should be less certain than that.”
The film was produced by James Wilson and Ewa Puszcyńska and executive produced by Reno Antoniades, Len Blavatnik, Danny Cohen, Tessa Ross, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek and David Kimbangi. “The Zone of Interest” is set to premiere in the U.S. on Dec. 8.