Jonathan Glazer’s chilling adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel doesn’t show you the Holocaust. It shows you the family living next door to it — the Höss family in their tidy garden, their afternoon swims, their dinner parties, while the chimney smoke and screams form the soundtrack.
Christian Friedel plays Rudolf Höss with bureaucratic banality. Sandra Hüller (yes, her again, in a separate Oscar campaign year) is the wife who’s built her dream home and won’t leave. Mica Levi’s score does the work of showing what the camera refuses to.
Glazer films almost everything from middle-distance, surveillance-style. The horror is in the casual ordinariness. The last sequence — a flash-forward to the modern museum — is one of the most powerful endings in recent cinema.
