Killing became “dispatching”; forced migration became “resettlement”; the mass murder of the Jews became Eichmann’s “final solution.” When you call what you’re doing to millions of your neighbors “special treatment,” you don’t have to think about what it really is.

The home is occupied by the notorious extermination camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real man, played here by Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their large brood of children, and a few servants, at least one of whom seems to be Jewish.

Hedwig — who proudly tells her mother she’s been nicknamed the “queen of Auschwitz” — admires a fur coat that arrives in a shipment brought in by a prisoner, trying on the lipstick she finds in the pocket.

The scenes of familial bliss take place in a beautiful garden or a comfortable home, but they’re shot with a severity that belies the setting; this is a world gone flat, a paean to a fascist dream of life properly lived, yet all surfaces and no depths.

The insistent bright ugliness gives way occasionally to something shocking (a few black-and-white segments reversed into photonegative, or a shot of a flower that fades to blood-red), all the better to remind us that none of this is beautiful, and we ought to be horrified.

“The dividing line,” Arendt wrote, “between those who want to think, and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences.” All that seems clear right now, at this point in history, is this question is eternally worth facing.

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