How did Christian Friedel play a man culpable for more than a million deaths?

The Other Side

This year’s Oscar favorite, Jonathan Glazer’s radical re-invention of the Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest, is told from the point of view of the perpetrators

By Ed Potton

You won’t see a more meticulously made film this year than The Zone of Interest — or a more disquieting one. Jonathan Glazer’s Auschwitz family drama is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, but that’s the only loose thing about it. The British director took almost a decade to research and re-enact the story of Rudolf Höss, the SS officer and then the longest-serving commandant of the concentration camp in occupied Poland where more than a million were killed.

Glazer’s film — winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, nominated for nine Baftas and five Oscars, including best director and adapted screenplay, which Glazer also wrote — was shot at Auschwitz but never shows the camp itself, playing out entirely on the other side of the wall, where Höss (Christian Friedel) lives comfortably with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five young children in a stucco villa with a charming garden and a swimming pool with slide. “We have everything we could ever want on our doorstep!” Hedwig says, giving her mother a tour of the garden. “The Jews are over the other side of the wall.”