The Zone of Interest” is the euphemism the Nazis used to describe the area around the Auschwitz concentration camp, including where the SS Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig lived with their children, in a house right next to the camp. We see Höss and his wife going about their ordinary-seeming private life, while determinedly ignoring the horror that was happening right next to them. This chilling embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” is at the center of the powerful historical drama directed by Jonathan Glazer.

The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has been nominated for five Oscars (including best picture, director and adapted screenplay). Glazer, who was born in London to a Jewish family, loosely adapted the film from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel. German actress Sandra Hüller (“Toni Erdmann,” “Anatomy of a Fall”) stars as Hedwig, the wife of Commandant Höss (Christian Friedel), who raises her family in deliberate ignorance in the shadow of the concentration camp walls. 

Glazer shot this German-language historical drama on location at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The commandant’s house still stands next to the camp but, due to restrictions at the protected historic site, the director had to re-create the house interiors and garden in an officer’s barracks adjacent to Auschwitz. 

Amis based his book’s commandant on Höss, and Glazer did additional research to deepen that link. He set the film near a time when Höss received a promotion that might mean having to relocate to Berlin — upsetting Hedwig, who did not want to leave behind the family’s house and garden. A couple reluctant to relocate for a job has a human ordinariness to it, but we quickly are reminded that Rudolf Höss’ job is killing.  

That sense of the banality of evil pervades this brilliant, artistic film, which takes a very different approach to making a film about the Shoah. The private life of the Nazi commandant and his family is the focus, as we watch them doing ordinary things: swimming and picnicking on the banks of a river, throwing a birthday party for the father, the children going off to school. 

Their life is comfortable, with the large house and its garden, stables and fields, forests and a river nearby. But the house shares a high wall with the concentration camp, just steps away from the front door. When Höss leaves for his work, we stay with his wife as she goes about her day. 

The sense of horror comes from knowing what is happening in the camp. We do not see the violence on the other side of the wall, but we hear gunshots and shouting, and we see smoke rising from the chimney. While the couple block out what is happening right next to them, one of the children becomes upset by the sounds. When Hedwig’s mother comes for a visit, she is unable to ignore the horror and cuts her visit short. 

The tone of the film is deliberately cool and distant. Scenes were shot in an observational style, with few closeups. Huller as Hedwig, who is more the film’s main focus, and Friedel, as Höss, play their characters in an emotionally restrained manner, with dead eyes and cold smiles. 

Hedwig and Höss compartmentalize, so they can block out the horror and their responsibility for it. The couple don’t talk about Nazi ideology; their conversations are about their personal ambitions and living in material comfort. In one scene, they talk about becoming farmers after the war, in a creepy fantasy of Ayran prosperity.  

The style of the film is artistic rather than a more conventional drama, using surveillance-like footage, tamped-down performances and some surreal moments, which might not be to the taste of some audiences. 

Glazer underscores the ordinariness of the Hösses private lives to show that seemingly ordinary people perpetrated the Nazis’ atrocities. But as we watch, their flawed characters, emotional coldness, selfishness and their embrace of an evil belief system are revealed. And we see that murder is the business Höss is pursuing in such a businesslike manner. 

The film reminds us that the potential for inhumanity can lurk in the most ordinary person; that we must be vigilant about “never again”; and that the possibility of evil is not something safely in the past, but within human nature still.

“The Zone of Interest” opens at Landmark Plaza Frontenac on Friday, Jan. 26