105 min | PG-13 | December 15, 2023 | A24
A Nazi commandant and his wife build their dream life in a pretty house with a big garden. On the other side of the garden wall sits Auschwitz. The film never looks over the wall, and it does not need to.
Rudolf Höss is the commandant of Auschwitz. He lives next door to the camp with his wife and five children in a house with a garden, a greenhouse, and a swimming pool. The family eats well, the children play, and Hedwig tends her flowers. Jonathan Glazer builds the entire film around what stays offscreen. The horror happens over the wall, and the movie watches the people who built their comfort against it.
Christian Friedel plays Rudolf Höss as a mid-level functionary obsessed with logistics. He discusses a new crematorium design with the bored efficiency of a man reviewing a factory upgrade. Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig Höss as a woman defending her domestic paradise with total conviction. She tries on a fur coat looted from a murdered prisoner and checks the pockets for lipstick. When transfer orders threaten the house, her panic is about the garden, never the smoke. Hüller makes the banality terrifying because she plays it as ordinary ambition.
Glazer adapts Martin Amis loosely and strips the novel down to surfaces. He shot the house with hidden cameras running in multiple rooms at once, which keeps the staging flat and surveillance-like. The real weapon is Johnnie Burn’s sound design. Gunshots, screams, dog barks, and the constant industrial hum of the crematoria sit under every domestic scene. Mica Levi’s score arrives only at the edges, in black-screen overtures that feel like the film holding its breath.
This is a movie about the wall people build to keep atrocity at a livable distance. The Höss family does not look away from genocide. They simply organize their lives so they never have to look at it. Glazer refuses spectacle and refuses catharsis, and that refusal is the argument. The evil here is not monstrous. It is a man who wants a promotion and a woman who wants her flowers to bloom.