The "Sonderkommandos" pose a special problem for anyone confronting the moral abyss of the Holocaust. Jews who took on the duties of shepherding their own people into the gas chambers and then processing the dead in the crematoria, they earned for their complicity a respite of four months of privileges before they met their charges’ fate. Tim Blake Nelson deserves credit for taking on this controversial subject, but what’s disturbing about his film is the phony, æstheticized treatment. Did Auschwitz inmates talk like outcasts from a subpar Mamet play? Should we regard the plight of these wretches as an existential microcosm rather than as one of the greatest crimes in history? Does the relentless degradation and violence speak of realism or sado-masochism?

These are probably not the questions Nelson wants to elicit with this relentlessly grim but artificial reconstruction of the real-life rebellion of one such Sonderkommando group in 1944. Although The Grey Zone does evoke an unremitting hell of pain, violation, and futility, the all-star cast — David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Mira Sorvino, and Natasha Lyonne suffering spectacularly as inmates and Harvey Keitel struggling mightily with his accent as the commandant — never let you forget Nelson’s stilted dialogue. (108 minutes)