Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” is loosely based on a 2014 novel by the English author Martin Amis. Glazer’s film tells the fact-based story of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) and wife Hedwig Hoss (Sandra Huller). Hoss, who is based on the real World War II historical figure, is the commandant of Auschwitz when the film begins in1943. But more to the point he, Hedwig and their five children along with servant-prisoners live in a large compound attached to the death camp, where ardent horse lover Hoss, who sports an extreme Nazi hair-style, goes to do his diabolical work of murdering Jews every day.

In contrast to Hoss and his family and the mostly blissful domestic vision they present, we are acutely aware of what is going on on the other side of the wall that separates the compound from the camp. We can see the smoke billowing from the stacks atop a building housing the ovens in which the bodies of the dead are burned. We can hear the fire itself. Sometimes, it rages. At others it is just a noise in the background. We also hear small arms fire, shouts and screams. The film depicts what we might call Hoss Family Values. They enjoy appetizing dinners. The children read books and swim. A darting black dog appears in several scenes. Hedwig is proud of her large garden and her lilac bushes. It’s too bad the wall behind the garden is topped by barbed wire, and a guard tower looms beyond. In another chilling moment, Hedwig loses her temper with one of the servants and icily reminds her that with a single word, she could have her husband, the commandant, “burn” the servant to death.

This is not exactly the “banality of evil” so much as the endless perversion of evil, in the manner of people who can resemble humans at one moment and become monsters the next. Hedwig can turn it on and off when it suits her. At home, Rudolf and Hedwig seem like ordinary middle-class parents. Another exception to this rule is when Hedwig goes through a selection of nice clothing, obviously the property of the dead, and selects a mink coat for herself, posing before a mirror. Waste not.

In the course of his career, London-born Glazer has made films about a magnificently diabolical hit man (Ben Kingsley, “Sexy Beast”), a woman who is convinced that a 10 year-old boy is her late husband reincarnated (Nicole Kidman, “Birth”) and a female alien cannibal cruising around Ireland in search of male victims (“Scarlett Johansson, “Under the Skin”). Do I detect a pattern? I do.

“The Zone of Interest,” which is mostly in German, a language director Glazer does not speak, benefits mightily from the intensely eerie score by Mica Levi (“Under the Skin”). The action begins with a long held shot and an image of a family having a swimming party and picnic beside a lake. In the most disturbing sequence, Rudolf takes the kids for a swim in the river that runs alongside the camp and detects human remains beneath his feet that must have traveled downriver, where bodies have been dumped. Appalled (Really?), he pulls his children out of the contaminated water and drags them to the compound to be bathed and disinfected. But can they wash away the sins of their father?

(“The Zone of Interest contains mature themes and sexually suggestive scenes)

“The Zone of Interest”

Rated PG-13. In German Polish and Yiddish with subtitles. At the Landmark Kendall Square, AMC Boston Common and Alamo Drafthouse Seaport. Grade: B+