Jonathan Glazer’s movies are cerebral and discomfiting, which means they’re hard to sell, and that is probably why they come around so infrequently. The Zone of Interest, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is his first feature since 2013’s sublime sci-fi puzzler Under the Skin. As with that film, The Zone of Interest is loosely based on a novel sharing the same title and premise, but from which it otherwise diverges substantially.

That premise is: Nazis! They’re just like us. Glazer overcomes our familiarity with the Banality of Evil by daring to foreground the banal.

This is a domestic drama about the mundane struggles of a household where the breadwinner, one Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), has a stressful job: He’s the commandant of the death camp at Auschwitz, just over the wall from the garden his wife so adores. That wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, from 2016’s Toni Erdmann and this year’s celebrated Anatomy of a Fall), minds their two children with the help of a nanny—not a paid domestic servant, but an imprisoned Jew temporarily spared the grim fate of other internees, but living in terror nevertheless. Intermittent cries of agony and despair waft from outside the house, and there’s the erratic punctuation of gunfire: here, the single crack of a pistol shot, there, a burst from a machine gun. We see smoke rise from the chimneys of low, windowless buildings, and we know what that portends.

But on the surface, the narrative engine of the film is simply that Rudolf’s tremendous efficiency and competence at the logistical details of mass genocide has won him a promotion—one his wife wants him to decline, because it would mean leaving the dream house she’s curated for her family, right next to the hell her husband has constructed on earth.

Glazer’s camera observes even the interiors of their house from a distance, creating an unusual amount of negative space within the frame. The characters speak in subtitled German, mostly about prosaic things: Hedwig asks Rudolf to take her back to an Italian spa where they once stayed together, perhaps before they had children. Rudolf dictates a memo directing the SS officers who’ve been helping themselves to the roses growing around the compound to have the common decency to pluck the flowers in a way that doesn’t damage the bushes.

Occasionally, Glazer will give us a close-up of one of those flowers while we hear a chorus of human suffering. Mica Levi, the same composer who contributed Under the Skin’s inimitable score, delivers an even more unconventional and discordant soundtrack this time, one that Glazer relies upon to establish the film’s tone for a long prologue before any imagery appears on screen. Later, once we’re drawn into the day-to-day affairs of the household, we see photonegative scenes of Rudolf and Hedwig’s daughter wandering the nearby woods, with the suggestion that her soul is being corrupted by mere proximity.

Here is a film that challenges, to an uncommon degree, what criticism is for. The three part Goethe test—What is this piece of art trying to accomplish? Did it succeed? and finally, Is the goal that the art achieved or didn’t a worthy one?—is helpful. Glazer’s goal with The Zone of Interest, I think, was to remind us of that which we try to forget: Humans have the capacity to impose suffering far beyond what our imaginations will permit us to contemplate. A Holocaust film unlike any other, this is an examination of evil that knows its audience has seen Schindler’s List and The Pianist and maybe even The Sorrow and the Pity. Glazer wants to puncture any scar tissue we might’ve built up from exposing ourselves to those movies.

He succeeds—by keeping the horror off-screen. When a frightened young girl is brought to Rudolf’s office, he looks her over, and then Glazer cuts to a shot of him washing his genitals in a sink. Glazer’s discretion, if that’s the word, makes the sporadic moments of candor more shocking: Hedwig loses her temper and tells their servant, “I could have my husband scatter your ashes across the field at Bernice!” Invited to a formal party function, Rudolf confesses to Hedwig he couldn’t enjoy the pomp and circumstance because he was distracted by thoughts of how he’d gas the entire affair if so directed; specifically, how he’d address the practical challenge of the ballroom’s high ceiling. A beautiful black Weimaraner follows Hedwig around the house, incapable of the moral reasoning that might enable it to know it has given its loyalty to so unworthy a person. (The dog belongs to Hüller in real life.)

Martin Amis’ 2014 novel The Zone of Interest centered on a character based on Rudolf Höss, the real-life Nazi who ran Auschwitz. (He was convicted of Crimes Against Humanity and hanged in 1947.) For his adaptation, Glazer has used the real names of the historical figures from which Amis took inspiration. As Glazer reminds us via a late-film device I will not reveal, this is a dramatization of real events. The names have been preserved to condemn the guilty.

Originally intended to open in area theaters on Dec. 22, the local opening of The Zone of Interest has been pushed back to Jan. 19, 2024.