Movies

The Traumatic True Story Behind ‘The Zone of Interest’

COLD SOUL

In the documentary “The Commandant’s Shadow,” concentration camp leader Rudolf Höss’ family attempts to reckon with his sins as “the greatest mass murderer in human history.”

The Commandant's Shadow
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest—a fictionalized study of the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp commandant whose family lived right beside his workplace—is a film about monstrous detachment, willful blindness, and moral rot.

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