Critical response
The Zone of Interest premiered to critical acclaim. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 356 reviews are positive, with an average rating of 9.0/10. 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." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 58 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Kevin Maher of The Times called it a "landmark movie, hugely important, that's unafraid of difficult ideas". 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". Donald Clarke of The Irish Times wrote, "Glazer may yet get in some trouble for taking such a formal approach to sensitive material. But, if anything, that self-imposed discipline – and utter lack of sentimentality – speaks to the profound respect he has for the subject." 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." Jonathan Romney of Screen International wrote that the film "eschews false rhetoric, leaving maximum space for the audience's imaginative and emotional response".
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". Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Through painstaking framing and sound design, its horrors gnaw at the edge of every shot." 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".
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." Conversely, the Italian film critic Davide Abbatescianni's review published by Cineuropa was less positive. He criticised the film for its disturbing atmosphere, which he found to be well-crafted but monotonous, and for the performances, which he felt could not bring any change to the concept presented in a film that he thought lacked variety and remained stagnant for two hours. Among the other rare negative reviews, Cahiers du Cinéma found, "The problem is not only the weakness of (the film's) formal lurches, which are much more derisory than those of Under The Skin, and remain here at the stage of mannerisms (why dispense them in such a furtive manner, if not to frustrate needlessly?). It's also that this fantastic idea of off-camera poisoning the frame without ever showing the forbidden image ends up running empty and looking at itself."
The Irish Times commented that German reviews were generally less favorable than English language reviews. Writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, however, Andreas Klib stated that "Here the camera repeatedly jumps over the axis between the characters – a deadly sin in illusion cinema – to show the back of the event. Because we are not supposed to take part in it, but rather pay attention to details: the clouds of steam from a locomotive on the horizon. The smoke rising from the crematorium into the evening air. The reddish glow of the night sky. The ash that fertilizes the rose beds. At Cannes, where The Zone of Interest won the Grand Jury Prize, some critics criticized the film for its lack of storytelling. But that's exactly the point of Glazer's film: it doesn't paint a story, but a world."
Sight and Sound put the film at 2 and 14 on their lists of the best 50 movies of 2023 and 2024, respectively. In June 2025, IndieWire ranked the film at number 2 on its list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far)." It also ranked number 12 on The New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" and number 56 on the "Readers' Choice" edition of the list. In July 2025, it ranked number 77 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."
