A24 revealed the official first trailer for The Zone of Interest, the Cannes Film Festival award winning historical drama film starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, selected as British entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
In the film, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Christian Friedel stars as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and Sandra Hüller as his wife, striving to build a dream life next to the concentration camp.
Also starring in the film are Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier, Lilli Falk and Medusa Knopf.
Release Date
Written & directed by Jonathan Glazer (his first film in 10 years), The Zone of Interest world premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize, and opens in select theaters with a release date of December 15.
Synopsis
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
Reviews
Grading the film an A- in their review, Entertainment Weekly wrote, “The Zone of Interest is a formalized and frightening Holocaust film, largely for the ways it displays the Hoss family as merely human beings. It’s a stark reminder of our complicity and the capacity for great evil in the most mundane of circumstances. I’ll never forget the experience of watching it, even if I can’t ever bring myself to endure it again.”
Variety review called the film “chilling”, writing, “It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality. “The Zone of Interest” isn’t a portrait of the victims of the Holocaust. It’s a portrait of the perpetrators. Yet what hovers over every moment is a human monstrousness that’s at once inflicted and repressed. The film’s haunting subject is the compartmentalization of evil.”
Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for The Zone of Interest.