How this Oscar-nominated movie conveyed the horrors of the Holocaust without ever showing violence

The most unsettling thing about “The Zone of Interest,” about a Nazi family living next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp, may be its chilling sound design.

“The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-nominated historical drama, is technically a film about the Holocaust. The film centers on the real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who live bucolic and seemingly mundane lives next door to the infamous concentration camp. But viewers never see the unspeakable horrors taking place just on the other side of the garden wall. Instead, they hear them. They hear them in the muffled screams, the heart-wrenching wails and the piercing gunshots. They hear them in the distant sounds of trains and in the constant hum of the incinerator. “I knew right from the off that I didn’t want to reenact these atrocities using actors and extras,” director Glazer told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in a February interview. “I feel that that imagery is something that we all know, and it’s seared into our consciousness as it is. Sound, of course, is interpretative. We’re able to see those pictures in our mind’s eye because we hear those sounds.” In a film otherwise short on spectacle, the sound design in “The Zone of Interest” is something of a main character. (In interviews, Glazer has said “The Zone of Interest” consists of two films: “the one you see and the one you hear.”)