A24 and Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama

A24 has unveiled the trailer for Jonathan Glazer’s film ‘The Zone of Interest’. The German-language Holocaust drama tells the terrifying story of real-life German SS officer Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who raised their children on a farm adjacent to Auschwitz. The film premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second most important award.

“The Zone of Interest” is based on Martin Amis’s 2014 book of the same name, and stars Christian Friedel as Rudolf and Sandra Höller as Hedwig, alongside Daniel Holzberg, Ralph Herfurth and Sascha Maaz. The film was shot entirely in Poland and Germany by award-winning cinematographer Łukasz Żal.

diverseLeading film critic Owen Gleiberman described the film as “haunting and profound, meditative and immersive, a film that raises human darkness to the light and examines it as if under a microscope.” Gleiberman continued in his review, “‘Zone of Concern’ is not a portrait of Holocaust victims. It is a portrait of perpetrators. Yet what hovers over every moment is the human brutality that is both inflicted and repressed. The film’s haunting theme is the fragmentation of evil.”

Glazer, who previously directed the 2013 sci-fi thriller “Under the Skin,” centered the film around the Hoss family as a way to depict man’s capacity for evil. “The greatest crime and tragedy is that humans did this to other humans,” Glazer said during a press conference in Cannes. It’s very convenient to distance ourselves from them as much as possible, because we think we don’t behave that way, but we should be less sure of that.

The film is produced by James Wilson and Ewa Buczynska, and produced by Rino Antoniades, Len Blavatnik, Danny Cohen, Tessa Ross, Ollie Madden, Daniel Batsek, and David Kimbanji. “The Zone of Interest” is scheduled to premiere in the United States on December 8.