In a year in which a film about a doll produced by a toy company has grossed $1.4 billion in box-office receipts, it may seem like bad taste to recall the tens of thousands of lives that have been sacrificed to unjust wars in the same period. But it’s that kind of adjacency that Jonathan Glazer flags in The Zone of Interest where one side of a carefully cultivated garden’s wall barely hides the coldly efficient killing machines of Auschwitz on the other side, whose labor helps make the garden thrive. Apart from their shared focus on interdependency, Glazer’s film isn’t nearly as dependent on Martin Amis’s novel as his film’s credits indicate. In Amis’s novel, for example, Paul Doll, the film’s Rudolf Höss Commandant surrogate, is a pretentious buffoon whose wife Hannah holds him in emasculating contempt. The novel cycles through three discrete but contiguousnarrative arcs: one focused on these fictionalized versions of the historic Höss and his wife Hedwig; the second on Angelus (Golo) Thomsen, fictional nephew of the historic Martin Bormann, who is as randy as most Amis protagonists are but also a Nazi skeptic who works to undermine IG Farben’s hold on Auschwitz’s slave-factories; and another fictional character, Szmul Zachariasz, made to serve as a composite of the camp’s Sonderkommando. Though we get closer to the inner workings of the camp in the novel than we do in the film, the primary indicator of what goes on inside the walls is the disgusting smell that wafts over them to unsettle the banality of the Dolls’ family life.

In addition to dispensing with the alternating plot-narratives devoted to Bormann’s nephew and a single Sonderkommandofuhrer, Glazer notably replaces the stink of Amis’s Auschwitz with a reinvented soundscape, which commands the ground of our reception from first frame to last, the film’s opening blacked-out frames conveying nothing but sound. Presumably inspired by the round-the-clock rail transports, incessant industrial production, and hard-working crematoria of a complex that extends for miles on the other side of the Höss’s garden-wall, this soundscape—though sporadically studded with the sounds of barked orders, screams and gunshots–is less representational than it is broadly atmospheric, less naturalistic than painstakingly composed of predictably diegetic and decidedly non-diegetic parts. It effectively substitutes an ominously omnipresent Auschwitz for the extramural Auschwitz we cannot see.

Drawing more on the memoir the historical Rudolf Höss wrote in the year before his execution than on Amis’s novel, Glazer offers viewers sustained immersion in what would occupy the periphery of attention in a dedicatedly “Holocaust film,” transforming the normally off-screen into the ob-scene in more ways than one. What caught my attention even more than Glazer’s focus on the Höss family’s obliviousness to what Papa does on the other side of the wall was how that indifference is dropped in favor of self-interest when Hedwig Höss is seen reveling in the “gifts” (a fur coat and jewelry) pillaged from transported and, for the most part, murdered Jews. (We also see one of the Höss children happily coveting a much humbler collection of human teeth that survived the furnaces.) This is not just a cheap shot. Having Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) close her bedroom door so that she can model the coat in private indicates an awareness of where the coat comes from and how it arrived, and even a small hint of shame, which is, however, quickly dissipated by the obvious pleasure she takes in what her mirror displays. (Hüller’s performance is particularly natural throughout thanks to the ubiquity of the constantly filming cameras Glazer scattered throughout the rooms of the meticulously reconstructed Höss house.) The avarice and opportunism that Hedwig models in this scene is of-a-piece with her refusal to move house when Rudolf informs her of his imminent transfer. As the scenes set in her lovely gardens (carefully tended by camp inmates) suggest, Hedwig happily exploits the large-scale transfer of wealth the dispossession of Jews has made possible, which provides her with a lifestyle she could hardly anticipate enjoying before and tenaciously attempts to preserve. Though we see the same kind of impulse animating the expropriation of Jewish-owned property and businesses by “ordinary Germans” as far back as Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns, Glazer forges a much broader connection here and elsewhere in his film between the corporate and personal incentives motivating the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. Indeed, he may even be suggesting, in closing scenes that transport us into Auschwitz’s interior as it exists in its preserved state today—stacks of old shoes and luggage piled high behind glass, workers mopping the floors of crematories–that the work of remembrance is itself caught up in economies of collection and display that sanitize the obscene, keep it at bay.

The very different zones of interest surveyed in All of Us Strangers are comprised of a seemingly emptied-out upscale high-rise residential building set at the vacant edge of London and an unidentified town on a suburban rail line that houses young versions of the protagonist Adam’s parents, who were both killed in an automobile accident when Adam (Andrew Scott) was 12, some 30 years prior to the time when the film is set. When we first meet him, Adam is living alone in his high-rise, seemingly having trouble both with his latest screenwriting project and his own solitude. Fortune comes calling with an insistent knock on his door from a disarmingly inebriated Harry (Paul Mescal), who offers Adam drinks and sex in an effusively straightforward way that even the reticent Adam finds difficult to turn down. The naturalness of this scene in Adam’s flat and others that follow as the two men enter into what seems to be a mutually passionate affair is sustained by the winning directness of the two actors; their lovemaking is presented straight on and very affectingly, as if they are the only two individuals left in the world.  But, as other developments suggest, Harry may not be quite as real as he initially seems.

He does, however, seem every bit as real as Adam’s late thirty-something parents to whose former home Adam travels by train on several successive occasions. There he is warmly received, with a natural surprise at how grown-up he is on the part of parents who seem happily frozen in place and time in a house to which they should never have been able to return, least of all in one piece. These scenes are deeply arresting, particularly as the chronically diffident Adam confesses his homosexuality to parents who reluctantly but eventually come to accept it, and even, at one point, invite him into their bed to sleep in childish comfort between them.

The film’s director, Andrew Haigh, has spoken candidly about the autobiographical elements of these scenes, which were, in fact, filmed in and around the same house in which he grew up. But Haigh never tips his hand to qualify the slippage of past into present and present into past. Indeed, the scenes at the house work in alternation with the remarkably tender scenes of lovemaking between Adam and Harry to suggest that they may be ways that a blocked screenwriter and possibly formerly closeted individual manages—at a moment of crisis– both to find his subject and satisfy his desire for love and acceptance. Haigh’s approach may come to seem a tad too formulaic when he chooses to synchronize the parents’ eventual withdrawal with what feels like Adam’s belated coming-of-sexual-age. But this isn’t the only surprise that Adam will encounter—or invent for himself—in a concluding twist worthy of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) on which much of the critical attention the film has received has understandably fastened.

Why I consider the largely domestic, often autobiographical domain of All of Us Strangers as much a “zone of interest” as the world-historical site of Auschwitz is because it closely reflects—despite its featured actors’ movie-star good looks—the places and spaces in which most of us live. If we agree that film audiences may be deeply affected by what they watch in theaters, on TV, on phones and laptops, and that most of what they see traffics in ultra-violence, mayhem, fantasy, special effects, and “steamy” sex scenes unlike those most of us enjoy in our daily lives, we may also concede that what audiences are missing are artfully depicted renderings of recognizably human experiences that occur in places not terribly different from the spaces where moviegoers live. We no longer get many cinematic reflections on, engagement with, the kinds of material that help us feel real about ourselves, as if what happens in quotidian life actually matters. Movies don’t need to emulate social problem films like Silkwood to engage the lived lives of their audiences. Nor do they need to perform the educative function of great postwar films like The Best Years of Our Lives, From Here to Eternity, or On the Waterfront, though that would certainly help filmgoers become more empathetic people. Rather, they need to see their own small lives enlarged in order to take or make meaning out of what surrounds them. Understated independent films from this and the last century like Moonlight (2016)and Ruby in Paradise (1993)do this in spades but so do louder cinematic statements like Dog Day Afternoon (1995) and Do the Right Thing (1989). I’d further submit that if we want to know why toxic masculinity is out of control, why many young people have a hard time negotiating personal relationships, why greed, ignorance, and intolerance are growing exponentially, just consider what Americans are not seeing as they obsessively gaze at the spectacles of beating, bullying, killing, and mass destruction on their screens. While we’re at it, imagine the difference it would make in widening the range of filmgoers’ understanding of the world should they be exposed to films that concentrate a lifetime of experience in less than two hours.