Glazer opted to tell the story of the Hösses rather than the characters they inspired and conducted extensive research into the family, as he sought to make a film that demystifies the perpetrators of the Holocaust as "mythologically evil".

Among its accolades, The Zone of Interest received five nominations (including Best Picture) at the 96th Academy Awards, winning two: Best International Feature (the first for a non-English British film) and Best Sound.

At night, while Höss reads the German fairytale of "Hansel and Gretel" to his daughters, a Polish girl sneaks out and hides food at the prisoners' work sites.

As Höss leaves his Berlin office and descends a stairway, he stops, retches repeatedly and stares into the darkness of the building corridors.

Paul and Hannah Doll, the novel's two main characters, were loosely based on Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving German commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife Hedwig.

[13] He collaborated with the Auschwitz Museum and other organisations, and obtained special permission to access the archives, where he examined testimonies provided by survivors and individuals who had been employed in the Höss household.

[16] Friedel recommended Hüller for the role of Rudolf's wife Hedwig, having first met her in 2013 while acting together in the historical drama Amour Fou.

[16][20] Hüller was first sent an excerpt of the script, an argument between Rudolf and Hedwig presented out of context, before learning the project's nature as a film about the Holocaust.

Although she had resolved never to play a Nazi, Hüller was convinced after reading the full script and meeting with Glazer, believing that he shared and addressed her concerns about how to properly depict Nazism on screen.

[23] The film's final scene, in which Höss retches repeatedly while walking down a flight of stairs, was inspired by the ending of the 2012 documentary The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer.

Production designer Chris Oddy ultimately chose a derelict building a few hundred yards away, built after the war but in a similar architectural style.

[16] He spent several months converting the home into a replica of the Höss residence, and started planting the garden in April 2021 so that it would be in bloom when filming began.

The approach, which Glazer dubbed "Big Brother in the Nazi house", allowed the actors to improvise and experiment extensively during filming.

[33] English musician Mica Levi started working on the score as early as 2016, and later spent a year in the studio alongside Glazer and editor Paul Watts.

"No stone was left unturned" said Levi in a Sight and Sound interview, as the team explored every possible avenue for how music could work in the film.

"[34] In the end Levi wrote dense and "formally inventive",[35] vocal-based compositions accompanied by a pitch black screen for the prologue and the epilogue, plus soundscapes created for the sequences involving the Polish girl and montages of garden flowers.

[16] The Zone of Interest was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival,[37] where it had its world premiere on 19 May,[38] and received a six-minute standing ovation.

In his Oscar acceptance speech at the 96th Academy Awards, Glazer said The Zone of Interest shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst, saying: "Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people."

"[54] On March 18, an open letter denouncing the speech as blood libel was signed by more than 1,000 "Jewish creatives, executives, and Hollywood professionals", including Amy Pascal, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julianna Margulies, Debra Messing, Eli Roth, and Michael Rapaport.

Eventually, over 450 Jewish creatives signed the letter, including Joel Coen, Todd Haynes, Joaquin Phoenix, Elliott Gould, and Wallace Shawn; the film's composer, Mica Levi, was also a signatory.

The website's critics consensus states, "Dispassionately examining the ordinary existence of people complicit in horrific crimes, The Zone of Interest forces us to take a cold look at the mundanity behind an unforgivable brutality.

[74] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called it a "devastating Holocaust drama like no other, which demonstrates with startling effectiveness [director Jonathan Glazer]'s unerring control of tonal and visual storytelling".

"[76] Raphael Abraham of the Financial Times wrote, "Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane — by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror.

"[77] Jonathan Romney of Screen International wrote that the film "eschews false rhetoric, leaving maximum space for the audience's imaginative and emotional response".

[78] David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised Glazer's camera process for instilling "a flattening evenness into a film where the lack of drama becomes deeply sickening unto itself".

[79] Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Through painstaking framing and sound design, its horrors gnaw at the edge of every shot.

"[80] In a four-star review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it "a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste", while also praising the "superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn".

[81] Writing for Worldcrunch, the German critic Hanns-Georg Rodek wrote that the film “concentrates in one garden the attitude of an entire nation that wanted to know nothing.

Over his twenty-four-year career as one of our finest filmmakers, Glazer has consistently executed high-wire interpretations of genre, and in the process completely reinvented them: crime (Sexy Beast), the paranormal (Birth), science fiction (Under the Skin).

[99] Haaretz journalist David Issacharoff stated that the Israeli "Zone of Interest" includes the mainstream news and settlers but not the peace activists who died in the Hamas attacks.