In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the centre of frighteningly familiar banality.

The film focuses on the domestic life of Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), beneficiaries of lebensraum, whose family home — nestled between train tracks and gas chambers — is spitting distance from Auschwitz, the infamous German concentration camp located in occupied Poland, where Rudolf serves as commandant. Their domestic life is idyllic. Yet over the wall next to their home, we can see smokestacks, and at night we hear screams and occasional gunshots.

Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity. Filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi.