YMMV / The Zone of Interest

• Angst Aversion: The film is a relentlessly grim story of a Villain Protagonist couple living a joyful, happy life with their children as one of the most tragic happenstances in human history happens right next door, exploring the amount of callousness and Dissonant Serenity required to ignore such an immense amount of human suffering that's well within hearing distance, aided with an utterly nightmarish sound design and Drone of Dread-filled score that's designed to make as uncomfortable a viewing experience as possible. Even Jonathan Glazer admitted to almost giving up on making the film because of how dark the subject matter was and added the scenes with the Polish girl delivering apples to the camp so it wouldn't be completely bleak.
• Awesome Music: There isn't much music in the film, but the two longest pieces leave quite the impression.
  • The opening music is eerily beautiful, with ghostly synths that recall the mournful sound of plainsong.
  • The music that plays over the end credits is absolutely nightmarish, featuring hair-raising vocal synths treated to sound like a One-Woman Wail. It sounds like a descent into Hell.
• Nightmare Fuel: Considering it's a Holocaust film, one can take the easy way out and simply say the entire movie. But to elaborate:
  • The movie is one huge exercise in Nothing Is Scarier. Not once do we ever see what's happening on the other side of the walls of Auschwitz, but the horrifying sounds of gunfire, screaming, barking orders, furnaces burning, and trains entering and exiting should tell you everything. And considering this is the Holocaust we're talking about, you just know the images we'd see would be some of the most disturbing and upsetting ever displayed. Further emphasized in the film's choice to mostly be filmed in wide shots: typically used to show the audience everything of the surroundings, the large, high walls obscure most of what's actually happening.
  • The river filling with the ashes of the dead. Made worse when the colonel reaches into the water and picks out a jawbone.
  • The scene in which Hedwig takes the time to show her mother around her food and flower gardens ends with a close-up of a rose (itself fertilized with the ashes of the dead) fading to an all-red screen, and the ever-present rumble and sound of a man screaming cutting out to an extremely ominous noise before snapping back to continue the film, almost as if the film itself is struggling to keep watching.
  • In one scene we see Rudolf standing in the Auschwitz camp with smoke from the crematoriums behind. As the screen fades to white we hear the sounds of people including a child being led to the gas chambers. We hear the sound of the gas filling the room and the people inside beginning to panic before the film abruptly cuts to the front of Rudolf's house.
  • At a celebration for the Nazis, Rudolf confesses he wasn't paying attention to the speech. He was too busy thinking how he could gas everyone in the room. Genocide has become all he is and there's nothing human left about him. Him retching on the stairs right after seems to be a purge of any remaining feelings before he goes on to continue his work.
  • The end credits music is terrifying, to the point that several movie theater employees have discussed the not-so-fun experience of having to clean auditoriums while having that blasting out of the speakers.

---