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I watched an Indiana Jones movie this afternoon, which is clearly an activity I have enjoyed off and on over the years. This time though it felt awkward and the film was possibly even a little distasteful. The issue is that I saw The Zone of Interest the day before and frankly it is so hard to accept comedy Nazi’s after watching this movie.

I’ll get past it, I don’t fundamentally have a problem with mocking evil but for the time being it does feel that films that treat the Third Reich as one dimensional villains are deeply trivialising what happened. The fact is they were actually humans and in going to great pains to show this The Zone of Interest makes them look far worse than they have ever been depicted on screen before, more so than Schindler’s List, Son of Saul or any number of other stories that have told around happened with Hitler’s Final Solution.

The idea behind the film, taken but refocused from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, is simple but carries with it incredible power. The narrative centres around a German family making a home in Poland, enjoying social engagements, bathing in the local river, balancing work commitments and nurturing their garden but he is Rudolf Höss, his job is being the commandant of Auschwitz and that garden is just over the barbed wired wall where thousands of Jewish people are being held prisoner, tortured and murdered. All the time that we see Hedwig Höss hanging out laundry, fussing over their five children and eating breakfast, the sounds of screams and gunfire, machinery and incinerators are unceasingly there from yards away.

Watching people go about their lives with this going on next door is soul destroying. It’s not even that they are ignoring it, it’s the rationalisation of the mass genocide that is so upsetting. These are not people following orders, there is no compartmentalisation here. These people, the children included, are just okay with it. That is what is so disturbing. There are moments when their lives are shaped by the actions of the camp; being involved in unimaginably cold work meetings about the ‘work’ they are involved in or benefiting from the spoils of others having everything stripped from them, but mostly it is just the sheer normality of their lives taking place not even a stone’s throw from the unimaginable atrocities that they are either directly involved with or are totally complicit in.

The way the movie handles all of this is so clever. On the one hand you are seeing genuine family moments, marital pressures, celebrations of promotions and the like but never do you move an inch away from what is enabling everything and it’s so upsetting, moving and enraging. It’s not just watching other classic wartime films that have brought this one back to mind, this has stayed with me anyway.

Deliberately or otherwise your knowledge of other images of those in positions of authority in Germany at the time, be they real or from fiction, are a big part of viewing The Zone of Interest. Even seeing Höss in his swimming trunks or his lounge suit we know he is an SS Officer because of the hair and the demeanour and being so familiar with these images in a different context carries weight even before you see and hear everything else.

The sounds of this movie are everything, at the start and on occasion throughout director Jonathan Glazer even blanks out the screen to emphasise this. It is their juxtaposition with the images that make the film what it is though. It is an incredible use of the medium of cinema and a proper work of art.

The title of the film is taken from the area where it is set; the name of plot of land immediately around the camp, but this could just as easily be called Nazi’s at Play or Auschwitz: Just a Place People Work (a point interestingly made in a brief latter moment change of time frame) but of course these would be beyond inappropriate. That’s kind of the point though, however you set this out it shows you people who are beyond what should be, but wasn’t and in some parts of the world still isn’t, humanly unacceptable. Amis’ book told of a love story taking place with this backdrop but Glazer knew it didn’t need this and his movie all the more incendiary without it.

The Zone of Interest won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has been nominated for Best Picture and Best International Picture at the Oscars (it is a UK and Polish co-production and is almost entirely in German). It is also sure to win Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAs on Sunday. It clearly isn’t an easy movie to watch but it is such an important one and artistically it brings huge rewards. I do think people should see it and I even feel a little honoured to have done so. I’ll get back to enjoying Raiders of the Lost Ark later but for now this is the right focus.