I’ve mentioned in other reviews how the most acclaimed films use ambiguity to their advantage; one sees what one sees, or wants to see, and the same circumstances can be interpreted in many ways.  This is one of those films, a non-judgmental slice-of-life of people who just happen to be the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp and his family.  They live next to the camp in a fairly nice house with an expansive garden, and they attempt to exist in the most comfortable manner they can, given the circumstances.  They may be Nazis, but hey, they’re just people, the same as us!

Jonathan Glazer’s film only gradually reveals the situation and its characters.  There’s no real plot; Mrs. Höss (Sandra Hüller) takes care of her family while her husband Rudolf (Christian Friedel) tries to make Auschwitz more efficient and enjoys his time away from the camp with his children and their dog.  Rudolf is eventually given more responsibility and transferred to another camp, only to return when a huge influx of Jews to his former camp is arranged.  That’s the story.

The Höss family is pretty much like anyone else, except that they have a trio of servant girls to make their lives more comfortable.  The kids play in the yard and the wife gardens, while dim screams and shots can be heard coming from over the wire-topped cement camp walls at all hours of the day and night, and smokestacks constantly belch the human smoke and dust from the camp’s furnaces.  This is meant as irony, of course, but also as ordinary occurrence for that location, and many others throughout Germany at that time.  This setting and the sight of the Höss kids playing with toy soldiers and guns might actually be sickening except for their banality and ordinariness.  Director Glazer, who adapted the story from a Martin Amis novel, uses only static shots to tell his story.  I don’t recall any pan shots at all, except perhaps for the thermal shots he employs three times to show a local girl leaving food for the captive Jews at night.  Those scenes are the most artistic in the film, but they also seem from another movie entirely.  One more note: this film has the worst beginning I have ever seen: a couple of minutes of black screen with just eerie music playing.  That beginning put me into a bad mood before the film had even properly begun.

I did not hate the movie while I was watching it.  There is something compelling about watching static shots of a German family simply living while just yards away one can hear Jewish people screaming and dying.  It actually bothers one character enough so that she leaves, but even this consequence is matter-of-fact and downplayed.  And when the film ends, it ends one morning at the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz with a cleaning crew sweeping and cleaning.  Now, is this genius filmmaking?  Enough to be rewarded with five Oscar nominations, including a Best Picture nod?  After some deliberation, I have decided that no, it isn’t.  I am flummoxed by the filmmaker’s decision to illuminate this family with no moral repercussions or judgments.  Perhaps it takes guts to make a movie like this about amoral people simply making the most of what they can during a time of war, but I did not need to see it.  For the record, I consider this to be the worst Best Picture nominee that I have ever seen.  There is no need for anyone to watch this movie.  ☆.  5 February 2024.

One final note: late in the film Rudolf attends a party and wonders how he would go about gassing everybody, which would be a problem at that location, given the very high ceilings.  At that point, when I knew the end of the story was near, I began to wonder how I as a filmmaker would prefer to finish this story.  I imagined that Rudolf would move on to another party, at a very particular German chateau, where he, along with all the other German generals and their friends, would be tricked into and locked into an underground bunker where they would be slaughtered with grenades by Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Charles Bronson and the rest of the Dirty Dozen.  That would be a much better movie than this.