By Kirk Boxleitner

In adapting Martin Amis' 2014 novel, "The Zone of Interest," to the big screen, writer-director Jonathan Glazer takes seriously the phrase, "the banality of evil," originally popularized by Hannah Arendt in 1963. Both Arendt and Glazer apprehend the legacy of the Nazis during World War II by focusing on how they hid their evil in plain sight, behind a screen of domestic mundanity.

Glazer's adaptation of "The Zone of Interest" lacks an actual plot, as it centers around German SS officer Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their household of children, servants and extended family, in the comfortably well-appointed home they've established, literally right next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp over which Höss serves as commandant.

This is a difficult film to watch, due not to the explicitness of its details, but rather the restraint with which it discloses such details. The horrors of the camp are never shown on screen, but they remain inescapable by how crudely they're blocked from view, with a gray wall shielding Höss' idyllic cottage and garden from all but the upper levels of the camp buildings, as they belch ash into the sky.

The Höss family is introduced enjoying the pastoral countryside and splashing in the stream, before we see the kids getting trundled off to school, and their parents giggling over memories of resort vacations past.

Even Höss' workplace discussions, about the engineering of the camp's crematoriums, are intentionally rendered with just enough technical detail to almost mute the fact that these men are devoting such hyper-focused attention to the task of committing genocide more efficiently.

Rudolf and Hedwig consider their next-door home to Auschwitz to be such a paradise on Earth that they're legitimately heartbroken when a career promotion threatens to take them away from it all, even as Glazer takes care to ensure that the background audio of all the Hösses' scenes at home are only rarely free from the shouts, screams, gunfire and other noises from the camp.

Indeed, when human remains from the camp filter into the river, where the children swim and play, Rudolf remonstrates the camp personnel for their carelessness. Otherwise, it's merely treated as the flip side of the coin, from when Hedwig harvests the camp inmates' belongings.

Even without revealing Rudolf's actions on the ground within the camp itself, the Höss family as a whole is depicted as passively predatory, with servants washing the blood off Rudolf's boots, and Hedwig threatening to have her domestic help reduced to cremated ashes in a fit of pique.

Glazer hammers home that such inhumanity was so normalized in middle-class Nazi German society that, when he shares a scene of a Polish girl secretly planting food in camp inmates' work sites after dark, he renders the visuals with a striking black-and-white night-vision effect.

As close as a film like this can come to an upbeat resolution is a jarring flash-forward scene, which subjects the self-satisfied Rudolf Höss to the karmic comeuppance of possibly perceiving a future in which his achievements indeed made history, but not for the reasons he had hoped.