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.
