The British writer-director Jonathan Glazer begins his new film, The Zone of Interest, with a howling void. Mica Levi’s keening, groaning score plays over a black screen for far longer than is comfortable. It feels as if we are descending to somewhere, quite possibly hell.

In many ways, we are. The film, which is quite loosely based on the Martin Amis novel and which premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, is set at Auschwitz. Or just outside it, at the home of the camp’s longest serving commandant, Rudolf Höss, and in the surrounding countryside. The dark of the film’s opening suddenly gives way to brightness and color: a family picnic by a lazy river. We then travel to the house, where Höss’s wife, Hedwig, an avid gardener, has overseen the planting of a lovely array of flowers and produce. The Hösses and their five happy children are living the dream of the Reich, having expanded east into Poland and enjoying a bucolic plenty. 

Rudolf is also overseeing the extermination of millions of Jewish people, just past the garden walls. The film only ventures into the camp for one brief shot. Otherwise, we are given only suggestions of the horror: guard dogs barking, occasional gunshots, the roar of a chimney which can be seen looming in the distance, belching fire and smoke and ash as the bodies of murdered prisoners are burned. In the foreground, things are sunny and domestic, the family dog happily chasing after the Hösses as they celebrate Rudolf’s birthday, host Hedwig’s mother for a mostly pleasant visit, cavort with another Nazi family in the swimming pool. Ash is scooped away by prison laborers while the Polish maids scurry around the house with a frightened stiffness.

Glazer is, of course, confronting Hannah Arendt’s observation of the banality of evil, a term coined in her report on the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s idea has been explored in art many times over the years, but Glazer’s chilling manifestation of it is perhaps especially striking. The director, whose last film was 2013’s Under the Skin, is well-loved for his formal daring. In Zone of Interest, he indeed delivers on that front. Glazer occasionally turns the screen monochrome as another of Levi’s composition grinds and yells; he shoots a pair of scenes in ghostly black-and-white night vision; and, in one stunning sequence, he zooms into the future to show an entirely different sort of banality. 

But perhaps his nerviest choice is to play so much of the film straight, calmly filmed and full of the petty concerns of contented family life. One could argue, I suppose, that Glazer makes his point early and then keeps hitting the same note. To my mind, though, there is something vital in the long immersion; to be steeped so thoroughly in the everyday life of a mass murderer and his nattering family is to remember, quite crucially, that not all actors in the Final Solution were raving lunatics like their Führer. There is sanity here, at least the outward impression of it, which proves far more rattling than a more articulated, performative villainy might have. 

Rudolf is played by Christian Friedel as a doting husband and father, maybe a bit of a workaholic but ultimately devoted to his loved ones. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig is the more forceful, outspoken partner, but really only when it comes to personal concerns like an Italian vacation or Rudolf’s impending transfer away from Auschwitz. Once or twice, though, we witness blurts of the cruelty within them: Hedwig blithely threatening a maid, Rudolf making a joke about gas chambers.

Their hideous indifference is apparent throughout, which may be where Zone of Interest finds its timeliness. How easy it seems to have been for these “normal” people to follow bigoted and violent rhetoric to its end, to accept and abet the happenings across the wall as simply the realization of a better, more productive, purer nation. Glazer is not one to traffic in cheap political allegory, but the relevance of his film is clear. As fascist impulses are increasingly indulged and supported around the globe, and ignored by those nominally in opposition to them, how far away are many of our contemporaries from the Hösses’ garden?

That worry is often dismissed as hyperbolic doomsaying, or a troubling trend that’s merely isolated, with little mainstream traction. Some people in Hungary, or Turkey, or Florida may feel differently, though. The Zone of Interest seems in heavy dialogue with a fear it sees as entirely legitimate; the film is a bracingly modern evocation of history, sans sentiment but screaming with fury and alarm as it attunes its ears to the low rumble of a coming repetition. 

This is Glazer’s most urgent, topical film to date, though it’s still stylish in his signature way. There may be some queasiness in appreciating the film’s technical acumen when it is making such dreadful allusions. But Glazer’s prowess is impossible to deny. Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time.