The gaze of The Zone of Interest is clinical and detached only nominally. While the horrors of the Holocaust are unseen in it, they manifest in their absence, always just out of frame and constantly accentuated by the unrelenting sound design.

This formal tension between distance and closeness is, essentially, also the film's central statement on the banality of evil – closing your eyes and hiding an idyllic family life in the midst of an ongoing genocide should be impossible but is, in a sobering truth that cannot be given an adequate explanation, not. The brief moments of surreal flourish and heightened drama, particularly the final sequence, are most effective in how the movie denies itself the merciful escape of coming apart completely and retreating from the grim reality of history as it happened.

Warning: not a terribly good double feature with Showing Up