Hannah Arendt's famous phrase may have been the springboard for the almost talented Martin Amis, son of the brilliant Kingsley Amis, to write a novel about the domestic life of the Commandant of Auschwitz. We've certainly been treated to many mean movie Nazis over the years, but Nazism as mere bureaucracy is fairly new. (Terrence Malick offered a far superior example of the genre with "A Hidden Life" (2019). In a world divided between cognoscenti and "deplorables," the point is well made that the bourgeoisie may co-exist and function comfortably with genocidal horror nearby. The sets and costumes seem genuine and the many long takes are certainly banal enough.
Review of The Zone of Interest
