I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing, but I’m certainly always bracing myself for the latest Holocaust film. There have been some horribly dim ones, such as The Reader or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, both of which invite you to sympathise with the perpetrators and you know what? I won’t if it’s all the same to you. (Don’t get me started on Schindler’s List; we’ll be here forever.) But Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest dispenses with the usual conventions. There is no humanising or even dehumanising. There is no pretence at insight. It was what it was; look at how ordinary these mass murderers were. Treated like this, it’s somehow more horrifying and terrifying than Nazis stomping all over the place being evil. It’s extraordinary, powerful, and will haunt you today, tomorrow, and maybe for all your days to come.

It’s extraordinarily powerful and will haunt you maybe for all your days to come

The starting point for Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin) was Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, as well as his own visit to the gas chambers where he noted that the family home of Rudolf Höss – Auschwitz’s commandant – was so near to the death camp that the two places even shared a wall. Life one side, genocide the other. Nice. How could a family live like this? Easily, it turns out.

The film opens with Mica Levi’s dread-laden score and a black nothingness, and then bright sunshine as we join Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their brood of blonde, healthy children picnicking by a lake. The water sparkles. They splash in the shallows and hunt for wild strawberries. Birds chirp. It’s idyllic. Eventually they make their way home and then it’s the next morning with Rudolf coming down in his SS uniform. This is when we first see how Auschwitz, with black smoke rising, looms over the beautiful, impressively large garden that is Hedwig’s pride and joy, and where the gardenias grow to the size of dinner plates. Rudolf puts on his death cap and goes to work. But we never see him at ‘work’. Not a single death is shown.

This follows the everyday domestic goings-on of the Höss family. It’s Rudolf’s birthday. Hedwig’s mother comes to stay. Rudolf reads the children bedtime stories. That sort of thing. There’s the sight of the occasional prisoner cleaning Höss’s boots or digging ash from the camp’s ovens to use in the garden as a fertiliser. (Nice.) But while kept mostly out of sight, the Jews are never out of mind. Everything happening beyond the garden wall is shown in a myriad of small ways. Hedwig takes delivery of a fur coat that obviously once belonged to a Jewish woman who has been murdered. She tries it on and also tries on the lipstick she finds in its pocket. A son counts his collection of gold teeth – extracted from corpses.

Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss in The Zone of Interest. Courtesy of A24

At one point Rudolf is in one room matter-of-factly discussing new, more efficient ways of killing, while Hedwig is gossiping with her friends in another. One says she found a diamond in a tube of toothpaste from the camp. ‘How clever do you have to be?’ she asks. ‘Yes, they are very clever,’ says another friend. The word ‘Jew’ is rarely said – but they all know who they’re talking about. And while we never venture into Auschwitz, we hear it. Always.

The sounds from that place, my God. There are shouts and screams and gun-shots and cracks and pops and guard dogs barking – the soundscape by Johnnie Burn is shattering. But the family tune all that out; they’ve disassociated. There’s something both specific and universal to this, in the sense that complicity can simply be a matter of looking the other way.

The film never feels false or manipulative. It was ten years in the making and included building a replica Höss house near the original one and starting the garden from scratch. Glazer also took the decision to use no artificial lighting – he thought it might ‘glamourise’ the Höss family – and no camera crew was ever present within the house. Instead, it’s hidden cameras and long takes, leading us to feel as remote from them as they are from it. They are never ‘relatable’.

Lastly I should say it isn’t true that Höss murdered three-and-a-half million Jews because as he said at Nuremberg: ‘[It was] only two-and-a-half million – one million died of disease and starvation.’ It is always good to put the record straight.