Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) has been keeping inconvenient information close to his chest for over a week but finally tells his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) that his upper ranks are going to transfer him to a different assignment, thus, their home with a garden, a pool, a greenhouse, and a staff will all be lost. Irate Hedwig is inflexible about how she feels about the home she cherishes, and if her husband gets a transfer she would like to stay behind with the children. A request can be written, that even if Rudolf is to be sent to a different post, perhaps the house can stay with the family. Rudolf doesn’t want the transfer either, it sounds like more work with wretched in-your-face responsibility—deputy inspector of all concentration camps at Oranienburg; it is also an insult that he has been disregarded for all his work in Auschwitz, Poland. Höss has amped up the efficiency of the transport system and chimney crematorium within his own region, an achievement that has earned him attention from the likes of Heinrich Himmler among others.

Yes, the indirectness of what the Höss family does and stands for is the strategy of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. For many long minutes, we observe the “idyllic” nature of their homestyle and the film even opens with a picnic and a dip in the lake that is an opposition to muted horror.

The unusual and big factor of the film is the pronounced sound design, where we hear sounds at moderating distances in the background: SS officer orders shouted, random gunfire, muffles of screams, the roar of the crematorium. In various backgrounds of shots, we see the billowing of smoke build from the chimneys and barb wire at the tops of walls.

You might be wondering, how disgustingly brazen and explicit is the evil of Höss and his family as demonstrated throughout its 105-minute runtime? As it turns out, it’s not really there. What is underlined in Glazer’s film is the indifference of evil, and how that callousness is enough to give us shivers. The family might be inconvenienced by screams emanating if stifled from the other side from series of walls, but they never bother to engage thinking about it.

The callousness is likely to be passed over from elder to young. There is one scene of an older teen dressing his Nazi regalia while the younger brother plays with toy soldiers. They are proud, in a generic I-belong-to-a-club way, of belonging to the National Socialist party.

Glazer uses a black & white celluloid negative to tell a vague side story, that one of the girls is planting apples around the edging ditches of the railway; must be a generous attempt to feed the incoming Jews arriving to Auschwitz. Such efforts reach a minimalized result. They have no constructs in order to develop a high understanding of human feeling.

A potentially boring sequence (not boring to me, just saying) is of Höss going around locking every door and window for the night and shutting off the lights, as if he is the king of the castle and that you never know an enviable intruder might break-in during after dark.

So how does Glazer go about telling us this story, anyway? He does it be eschewing any subjective camera shots and going for objective camera shots the entire way; you cannot fault the film of going in for fake empathy. The static camera and carefully placed objective stances, that gives us a remoteness entry into this material, is the only way to go. Kubrickian.

Does the film finally take us entry inside the concentration camps, just as “The Grey Zone” (2001) or “Son of Saul” (2015) did? Glazer does, but not in the way that I had expected though it is of utmost curiousity to me that he shows us affectless workers inside the Auschwitz camps when we do finally go in. In a subdued way, there is a disconnect between human activity and the atrocity of what those Auschwitz camps were about.

The Zone of Interest is a cerebral film that wants you to look at the denial and compartmentalization of history, and uncultivated psychology of those who don’t get atrocity and horror even if they’re living next door to it. If you want vivid examples of actual horror, Glazer I suppose wants you to go watch the Tim Blake Nelson or László Nemes films, or Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” (1956). Nevertheless, Glazer has made an obstinate and profound statement on the blindness of evil, the indifference thereof.