In this chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality.

It is summer in the mid-1940s, and a German family, husband Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall) entertain family and guests in their vast backyard garden on the weekends and tuck their kids in bed at night. In the mornings, she oversees chores with a cadre of housekeepers and cooks, while he goes to work as head of Auschwitz, the infamous German concentration camp located in occupied Poland, where Rudolf serves as commandant. Their domestic life seems ideal, yet over the wall abutting their home, we can see smokestacks, and at night hear screams and occasional gunshots. Towards the final days of the Holocaust, Hedwig is fixated on self-preservation, while Rudolf is increasingly burdened by his duties. We reside inside the family’s encampment, with background voices of ghost-like prisoners muffled by the perpetrator’s quotidian musings. At one point, Hedwig and her atrocious friends joke about their new luxury goods, received from Canada — the nickname of the storage facilities where such items, after being confiscated, were stored — at the demise of their former neighbors.

Based on the eponymous novel by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity, filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi.