NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Madman Blu-ray (November 2026): Madman have transferred Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest to Blu-ray. Glazer breaks the observational style with a few striking interruptions. The film opens over a long black screen accompanied only by Mica Levi’s dissonant overture, which seems to tune us to listen rather than look. Later, a screen flooded with red stands in for what cannot be shown. Most memorable are the thermal-imaging night sequences of a Polish girl who hides apples for the prisoners in the work sites. The Madman Blu-ray of The Zone of Interest is dual-layered with the 1 3/4 hour feature having a very high bitrate. It’s in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio in 1080P.Since this is a recent production shot digitally, there are no source issues, and the image is about as clean and consistent as Blu-ray can get. The deep focus of Łukasz Żal’s fixed, wide-angle compositions comes through with excellent detail from foreground to background: the gravel and grass of the garden, the textures of the camp wall and its barbed wire, the brickwork of the barracks beyond, and the snow-dusted benches of the winter park. Colors are natural and slightly cool, with overcast skies and gray concrete letting the saturated accents stand out, such as Hedwig’s red dress, the flowerbeds, and the deep green of the lawn. Contrast is strong. The backlit interiors hold detail in silhouette, and the black levels in the present-day museum coda are deep and solid without crushing. The one real drawback is that the English subtitles are burned in and can’t be removed, which is always frowned upon and will bother some viewers more than others. For those who want the ultimate presentation, A24 is releasing the film on 4K UHD and on Blu-ray on December 15th, 2026 HERE, and as a recent digital production the image quality there should be... perfect. Still, this Madman 1080P transfer is a very strong presentation of Glazer’s meticulous visuals.

NOTE: We have added 66 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

If the image shows us almost nothing of the camp, the soundtrack tells us everything. Sound designer Johnnie Burn (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Under the Skin, Birth,) built an extensive library of period-accurate sounds, and the off-screen audio runs continuously beneath the daily life of the house. The low roar of the furnaces, distant gunshots, barking dogs, shouted orders, trains arriving, and screams are mixed so they never draw attention to themselves, and the family never seems to hear them. The effect is relentless and cumulative, and the Oscar it won is entirely deserved. On their Blu-ray, Madman offer a DTS-HD Master 5.1 surround track at 24-bit, plus a linear PCM 2.0 stereo option at 16-bit. The surround track runs at almost double the bitrate of the stereo. The 5.1 mix is where this film truly lives. The separation is excellent, and the camp seems to press in from the rear channels just as it presses against the garden wall. Mica Levi’s sparse, unsettling score, especially the overture over the black screen at the opening and the music at the close, has real depth and a disturbing presence. Dialogue, almost exclusively German, is clear and well placed. The stereo track is a welcome alternative, but the surround track is the way to experience this film. As noted, the English subtitles are, sadly, burned in, and this is a Region FREE Blu-ray.

This Blu-ray release from Madman contains three short featurettes, each under three minutes: A Rare Perspective runs just over two minutes, On the Soil about two and a half minutes, and Uncomfortable Reflections close to three minutes. They’re built from interviews with director of photography Łukasz Żal, producer James Wilson, sound designer Johnnie Burn, and stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller. Żal discusses the unusual approach of fixed, hidden cameras recording the actors in the house and garden, and Burn talks about the soundscape that conveys the camp the film never shows. Wilson covers the production at the site beside Auschwitz, and Friedel and Hüller reflect on the discomfort of inhabiting Rudolf and Hedwig Höss. The featurettes are well produced and insightful, but they’re very brief, and fans will likely wish they ran much longer. There is also a theatrical trailer, and a “Madman Propaganda” section running over eight minutes, which includes an anti-piracy advert and promos for Broker, Decision to Leave, How to Blow Up a Pipeline and The Whale. The supplements are slim for a film of this stature, and we hope the A24 editions will offer more..

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is a masterpiece of omission, one of the most formally rigorous and quietly devastating films ever made about the Holocaust. By keeping the camera on the commandant's family as they pursue their domestic dream beside the wall of Auschwitz, Glazer forces us to listen to the horror rather than see it, and the result is a film that implicates rather than absolves. Glazer, whose other brilliant films include Birth, Under the Skin, Sexy Beast, draws chillingly ordinary performances from Christian Friedel (The White Ribbon) as Rudolf Höss and especially Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) as his wife Hedwig, the self-styled "Queen of Auschwitz." Mica Levi's (Under the Skin) sparse, harrowing score and Johnnie Burn's Oscar-winning sound design are as essential as Łukasz Żal's (Ida) cool, clinical, surveillance-like imagery. The Madman Blu-ray offers a very strong, high-bitrate 1080P presentation and an immersive surround track, but the burned-in English subtitles are a black mark, and the extras are slight. A24 will release the film on 4K UHD and Blu-ray in December 15th, and the a/v quality there should be excellent. Those editions will have optional (not burned-in) English subtitles and much more substantial supplements, including Filming Zone, an over 1/2 hour making-of documentary directed, edited and photographed by Filip Skrońc, which can be watched with or without commentary by production designer Chris Oddy, costume designer Malgorzata Karpiuk, director of photography Łukasz Żal and editor Paul Watts. There is also a short documentary on Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk (as a young girl, she delivered food to the camp prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp and she passed on messages to them. She appears as a character in The Zone of Interest and in Glazer's acceptance speech, he dedicated the film to her.) Plus there is a recording of "Sunbeams," written and performed by Joseph Wulf, and postcards with set photography by Agata Grzybowska and Kuba Kaminski. Those who can wait may prefer those editions, but this is an unforgettable film that demands to be seen.

Gary Tooze