It’s been 30 years since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and its images of the Holocaust still haunt. Perhaps English writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest will prove just as memorable – not for what it shows (which is comparatively little, hence its M rating), but for what it leaves us to imagine.

Filleted from Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, the film takes its viewers to the periphery of the Auschwitz concentration camp, circa 1943, and no further. We see its wire-topped walls, glimpse its gates and its belching chimneys, but we don’t see what is taking place inside. Instead, we hear it. Much of Glazer’s portrait of the day-to-day lives of those charged with implementing the Final Solution plays over a sonic tapestry of distant screams, shouts, gunshots and a dull roaring noise – the sound of some giant machine in operation.

A still from The Zone of Interest

The setting for the first part of the film is the orderly home of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel). You may already know the name. The commandant of Auschwitz for several years, Höss was...