Jeremy Taylor

This film follows Commandant Rudolf Hoess and his family in their villa on the other side of the wall from Auschwitz. He and his wife are revealed as petty, self-serving, racist but, above all, ordinary. The horrors of the camp itself are out of sight but a constant brooding presence rendered to full effect by the unsettling cinematography and soundtrack. One hears shouts, cries, gunshots and the constant roar of the crematoria furnaces. Beyond the gardens lovingly tended by the Hoess family one sees the smoke of the chimneys by day and the blaze of the furnaces at night. Ultimately this is a disapponting movie. It is an interesting exercise in style and atmosphere but has nothing new to say about the Holocaust or its perpetrators. To the extent that it has a message it is the one that Hannah Arendt derived from observing Adolf Eichmann at his trial. It is one hour and fourty-five minutes on the banality of evil. Unfortunately banality does not make good cinema.