This article contains light The Zone of Interest spoilers.

Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest never once offers to hold your hand. While the film is not coy about its setting during the mind-crushing horror of the Holocaust, it demurs from telling you what to think about its images. This is a movie that dares you to merely observe, to study, and to have the courage to not look away. It doesn’t even tell you what the title The Zone of Interest is referring to—although it is obviously nothing good.

And it is that implicit evil, that unspoken insidiousness, which led to the creation of the term in the first place. Indeed, the zone of interest, or “interessengebiet,” which translates to “interest zone,” was a euphemism coined by bureaucrats in the SS to create a kind of bland, innocuous language which concealed the premeditated murder...