In a sense, The Zone of Interest is Hannah Arendt’s famed observation about “the banality of evil” made into an entire movie. That’s reductive, I know. Writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s new film is far too artistically complex and daring to confine it to such a summary, and yet I can’t shake the enveloping aptness of Arendt’s discomfiting view, which she arrived at while covering the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. More than maybe any other cinematic weighing of the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest is shaped and hardened by the mundane.

The film is set almost entirely on the grounds of the large, meticulously appointed home of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. This property is literally on the other side of the wall from the camp, making the rest of the Höss family neighbors to crimes against humanity. Glazer refrains from directly showing anything that happens within the camp, but the atrocities are still ever-present, often heard as a terrifying din as the family goes about their daily doings out on the pristine greenery of their lawn. Except for an unpleasant sternness in the demeanor of Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, giving a tricky, precise performance), there is no indication that the members of the household are all that different from those in any number of domiciles across Europe, including those from which the prisoners next door were torn away.

Taking this deliberately oblique approach to such colossally important subject matter is bold, and Glazer doubles down with additional choices. The framing of shots is meticulous, and every craft element of the film — Łukasz Żal’s cinematography, Mica Levi’s music, Paul Watts’s editing, and on and on — is striking. Sometimes, Glazer’s choices are more jarring than entirely effective, such as the screen briefly going fully red or his use of a thermal imaging camera to shoot scenes of a local girl’s nighttime gestures of quiet resistance. Even in those instances, though, there’s little doubt that there’s unique artistic purpose at play. I have a few more misgivings about a storytelling beat very close to the end of the film that briefly, sharply changes the narrative perspective. Whatever the intent, I fear that the moment draws parallels of indifference that aren’t fair or accurate.

As could have been said about every one of Glazer’s prior features, The Zone of Interest is unlike anything that’s come before it. It is certainly recognizable as a specific type of art film, and a little rummaging through cinema history would unearth other examples of Glazer’s various high-wire techniques. I’m skeptical that there’s a screen predecessor where the details add up the same way. By staying simultaneously so distant and so close to the Nazis’ brutality, Glazer manages to make the drama that much more difficult to endure and the judgment more broadly damning. The film offers a rebuke to anyone who has ever looked away when they should have been bearing witness and striving to effect change. The Zone of Interest tacitly argues that maybe it’s the banality itself that’s evil.