Zone of Interest is unironically kino

The best way to watch this movie is to see it without having heard anything about it (whilst having a passing understanding of the Holocaust; without this, I think it'd seem slight).

I've always been morbidly fascinated by the Holocaust precisely because it's so unthinkable, but it happened so recently (I was struck by the fact that the children depicted in this movie are only slightly older than my parents). I've never seen or read anything that comes close to explaining, in an emotionally tangible way, how the whole thing worked. Zone Of Interest probably comes the closest. In Glaser's movie, 'the Holocaust' is something happening just slightly out of sight. The characters live just outside the perimeter fencing of Auschwitz, in a lovely home constructed for them as the family of Auschwitz's commandant. The then-unnamed Holocaust was, to them, a few puffs of smoke and ash that blankets their yard, distant but unclear screams, smells, and gunshots. There isn't a single named Jewish character aside from the characters' house staff. The main characters carry on their lives with this backdrop (including, in one scene, a child's pool party that occurs while untold horrors occur audibly but invisibly). It is foreboding in a way that I'm not smart enough to explain.

Compared with something like Schindler's List, in which Speilberg depicts Goeth as an almost Satanic evil, Rudolf Hoss is shown here as a cypher who engages in mass murder the same way any public servant navigates government bureaucracy. A scene towards the end where he shares with his wife that, whilst at a party, he lamely daydreamed about the logistics of gassing everybody in the room, seems to suggest that even his most clearly murderous impulses are banal. Glaser seems to hold the truly nihilistic view that the functioning of the Nazi's operations were dependent on everyone involved having little intellectual interest in the things they did, rather than being zealots for the cause.

If we consider the 'Holocaust movie' as it's own subgenre that began with the 1970 network TV miniseries, reached a low with 'The Boy In Striped Pyjamas' and 'Jojo Rabbit', I think we will look back on Zone of Interest as the example that most closely reached some sort of verisimilitude.

Don't watch if you're an r-slur and have brain rot