When reporting on Nazi official Adolf Eichmann during his trial at Nuremberg, Hannah Arendt was struck by Eichmann's perplexing ordinariness. She remarked: "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period."

Eichmann's plainness is a trait Arendt would go on to use as the foundation for her theory on the "banality of evil" - how an entire public could so quickly become complicit in mass atrocities, and go about their daily lives while carnage was wrought all around them. And until now, I have never seen a film more effectively capture this idea than Jonathan Glazer's penetrating psychological drama, The Zone of Interest.

Set in the little oasis that SS officer Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their family have built right next to Auschwitz, of which Höss is the commandant - The Zone of Interest gives us a slice of life into the everyday activities of these figures. The goal, according to Glazer and his team, was to get to the "atom-splitter" of an idea (according to producer James Wilson) why Hedwig Höss told her husband that they would 'have to drag her kicking and screaming' away from Auschwitz when told about his job transfer.

Glazer's Höss, played by Christian Friedel, is feeble-mannered and soft-bodied. We never see him commit any atrocities on screen, and are witness only to the even-tempered nature he brings home - which peaks only in moments of bureaucratic ambition. Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller, is less delicate. Hüller plays Hedwig with a pinch of brutishness - clunking about the house and barking orders at staff. She is only tempered when surrounded by her worldly goods or joking in bed with her husband, as firearms blast off outside their window. These are people who have pushed and networked their way to the top - which, if it weren't for the relentless screams carrying through their house, you could believe was a bid for Höss to be nothing more than an ad executive.

The film makes a pointed effort not to include imagery inside the concentration camp - only allowing us glimpses through tight shots of Höss as he calmly observes the brutality, and very daring infrared scenes of a girl smuggling apples for the prisoners. But, violence or not, The Zone of Interest reads as a daylight horror. Mica Levi's bone-chilling, absorbing score plays heavily over extravagantly crafted scenes of the family frolicking in a river, or lounging in arm chairs as smoke from the chimneys balloons in the background. And that is the key - Auschwitz is a backdrop for these characters - whose horrific talent at compartmentalization allows them to sleep at night - even sometimes during the day, as their fellow human beings scream in terror on the other side of the wall.

Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, made sure to keep a "critical distance" from their subjects - watching them with a static camera and allowing them to move about the house undisturbed by the production. What this makes for is actually quite claustrophobic - endless shots of the family and their staff walking through doors, sidling past their dog, or pushing past each other. The result is calming, hypnotic. These lives, free of worry about the world outside the house, are monotonous and familiar. The repetitive shots, paired with a heavy score and eerie soundscapes, comprise two films. As Glazer puts it, "one is the film you see, and the other is one you hear." The horror of Zone of Interest is not sensational or eye-catching. It is remarkably, frighteningly regular.