Jonathan Glazer, the film director who makes beauty feel like a moral trap

Jonathan Glazer

Photo: Ross from hamilton on, Canada / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 26, 1965 London, England
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Zone of Interest, Under the Skin, Sexy Beast
Awards	Academy Award · Grand Prix, Cannes (2023, The Zone of Interest) · FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes (2023, The Zone of Interest) · BAFTA · César · BIFA Best Director (2001, Sexy Beast) · MTV Video Music

There is a scene in The Zone of Interest — Jonathan Glazer’s account of domestic life beside Auschwitz — where nothing is shown. The children play. The garden is immaculate. The chimneys smoke on the far side of the wall. This is not a euphemism. Glazer films precisely the things Rudolf Höss’s family chose to see, and invites you to notice how long you could live there without looking up. It earned him the Oscar for Best International Feature Film in 2024. Then he used the podium to say that the Holocaust was being hijacked by an occupation.

He was born in London on 26 March 1965, into a family with Ashkenazi Jewish roots reaching back to Vilnius and Odessa. He grew up in Camden, where he attended the Jewish Free School before studying Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University. Theatre Design, it turned out, was the right training for someone whose central preoccupation would be how you arrange a frame so that what lies outside it becomes unbearable.

The career that followed was not a straightforward march toward prestige. Glazer spent the 1990s directing commercials — the Guinness ‘Surfer’ advertisement of 1999 is still analyzed in advertising schools — and music videos that announced a sensibility that had nothing to do with the industry’s appetite for visual flattery. His videos for Radiohead — ‘Street Spirit’ and ‘Karma Police’ — used the conventions of the music promo to create images that felt genuinely cold rather than atmospherically cold. He won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction in 1997. He was also, during this period, learning how much could be communicated by refusing to explain.

Sexy Beast arrived in 2000 and established immediately that Glazer had no interest in the grammar of the British gangster film. Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan — a man whose menace derives entirely from his refusal to stop — is a performance that Glazer conducted by removing the conventional cushion a director provides between an actor’s intensity and the audience. The British Independent Film Award for Best Director followed. More importantly, the film made clear that Glazer knew what he was making before he began: the shape of the thing was settled, and the energy was entirely in the execution.

Birth came four years later, with Nicole Kidman playing a widow whose grief is interrupted by a boy who claims to be her dead husband reincarnated. Glazer held his camera on Kidman’s face through intervals that would make any other director nervous, and Kidman held them — the film lives or dies in the gap between what her character wants to believe and what her face refuses to claim. Some critics found it cold. It is cold. That’s the argument.

Then nine years passed. This is the aspect of Glazer’s career that most filmmakers would resist describing as a method, but it functions as one. The silence before Under the Skin was not a fallow period: it included the Sony BRAVIA ‘Paint’ commercial, Levi’s ‘Odyssey,’ and the long process of adapting Michel Faber’s 2000 novel about an alien predator in Scotland. Scarlett Johansson was filmed partly using hidden cameras among unsuspecting civilians in Glasgow, mixing staged scenes with something much closer to documentary, until the film achieved a texture that made its horror feel less like genre and more like an encounter. It was named the best film of 2014 by multiple critical organizations. It found only a small audience at the time.

Another decade. The Zone of Interest premiered at Cannes in 2023 and won the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize. Adapted from Martin Amis‘s 2014 novel, it centres on Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family — their domestic arrangements, their garden parties, their children’s birthday presents — with Auschwitz audible but never visible beyond the wall. No footage of the camp. No survivors. No deaths shown. The horror is entirely in what the film keeps out of frame, and in the audience’s knowledge of what that wall contains. It won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film in 2024 — the first British film to do so — and the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. The César for Best Foreign Film followed in 2025.

The critical element of Glazer’s body of work is this: he spent his commercial years learning how to make things seductive — how to make a viewer stay inside an image, want what the image wants. His feature films use that same competence to trap the viewer. The Zone of Interest is the argument stated most fully: a film about atrocity that refuses to show the atrocity, trusting the audience’s visual intelligence to fill in what the frame withholds, and asking them to notice that this is exactly what Rudolf Höss’s family also did.

At the 96th Academy Awards in March 2024, Glazer accepted the Oscar for Best International Feature Film and said: ‘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.’ The response divided the film industry and the Jewish community. What was less discussed was how consistent the speech was with everything Glazer’s films have argued: that moral safety is not a position his work is prepared to offer, to viewers or to himself.

The next film is already in development. At the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna in 2025, Glazer told the audience that he has something in mind and will not take another decade to make it. At Cannes two years earlier, when asked what the next project would be, he said the word ‘tenderness.’ After four films about the distance between human beings and what they are capable of, that is either a departure or the same argument approached from the other side.