Fake History Hunter

This article was originally a thread on social media, which is why it is formatted with lots of images and short responses.
The text is about the image below that paragraph.

This is a very short review because there wasn’t that much I could find that was wrong with the film and there was more to think about than talk about.

I was very impressed with ‘The Zone of interest‘, it reminded me a bit of the terrifying film ‘Conspiracy‘.
Like many people who saw it I couldn’t help but think of the famous phrase “the banality of evil’.
Nothing happened while at the same time so much was happening.

The trailer:

Even though there wasn’t much of a story, there also was a massive story, which I know doesn’t make much sense, until you see it.
What we’re watching is just the daily life of a family, they go about their business, mundane even.
Children playing, dad at the office, household chores… but… something is happening just outside of what we can see, something horrific beyond compare.

But for most of the film all we see is this relatively normal family doing family stuff.
You feel like an observer, a ghost but one from the future just watching what’s happening in this house.

For me this worked very well, I was glued to the screen.
It was well acted and had a great script too:

Of course I couldn’t help but look for historical inaccuracies but I didn’t really spot any.
The film made a good case for going with historically accurate hairstyles even if it may look weird to the audience.
Historical fashion & hair being very weird to the modern day public is often an excuse used to defend inaccuracies, but this film shows that you should ignore that and go for authenticity anyway.
This choice will make this film not look 2020s dated in decades to come:

I loved the faded colours, this is what flim of the era looks like and it made it all look like some sort of home-film shot by a random observer.
But it also puts a barrier between the viewer and the story, makes it feel further away.
So I would like to have seen it with normal colour as well, just to see what kind of effect it would have.
It looked good though:

The only time I wondered if a mistake was made was during a party in Berlin and there were a couple of blackout violations.
During the war, with air raids going on, even top Nazis would probably not have lights on and curtains open at night:

Besides that I didn’t spot anything that I thought was wrong.
So much effort was put into getting the details right that the complete picture, the historical scene, feels right.
It makes such a huge difference if the film makers truly care about authenticity, accuracy & details:

Watching people having a normal, even almost boring life while you know what is happening behind the wall in the camp is so difficult to comprehend.
But all we notice are the noises and a few dark clues here and there and it’s horrendous.
You think about what you can’t see constantly:

To me this was a really good film, superb acting, wonderful camera work, overall just very well made with knowledge of the matter, lots of research and effort put into depicting the era accurately.