This is a minimalist, critically lauded, historical biopic, distantly based on Martin Amis’s novel about Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. It’s cleanly and beautifully shot and cleverly staged, but it makes its basic point early on, then potters indulgently with it for 100 minutes or so.
It was filmed at Auschwitz, but we never see inside the camp, whose high barbed-wire-topped walls lie across the road from the Höss’s neat front-garden wall and gate before they continue as the wall of their delightful gardens and grounds. We see smoke and flashes of light from the camp’s chimneys, and we hear sounds – of industrial clanking and hissing, of trains, and occasionally of people shouting and screaming. But we see Höss, and his wife Hedwig and their children, only in their house, in their garden, and playing around in a nearby river, with Rudolf often distracted by his full-time job.
