As with the opening text, filmmaker László Nemes assures the audience will understand. With minimal dialogue, the audience are drawn into his space, and for the audience to understand the situation through him. The film remains in this shot composition and follows him in a hand-held, shaky-cam aesthetics as he walks toward and alongside a confused and scared crowd coming off the trains. Coming from the trees and into focus is our protagonist Saul (Géza Röhrig) who is positioned in the frame in a close-up.
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It begins out of focus, in a tranquil setting of birds chirping, and a moment of relative peace then a whistle blows to break the serene landscape. On such an extensively covered chapter in history this film offers a bleak experience of human endurance, and is stark reminder of why it’s important to remind ourselves of this. In its confidence and respect for the audience, it doesn’t waste its runtime on the historic facts and the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust – most patrons entering this picture will be acquainted with such knowledge. The film opens with text to contextualise its story. Now 30 years later, Son of Saul’s release is timely – as the Holocaust becomes more distant with each passing year, Nemes’ film jolts us all awake again.Auschwitz, 1944: a Jewish Hungarian, who burns the corpses of his own people, recognises a young boy from the crematorium and seeks a Rabbi for a proper burial. 30 years later, Claude Lanzmann’s hugely important Shoah (1985) expanded the conversation in a 9 ½ hour documentary without a single archival footage or photo. In 1955, we had Alain Resnais’ chilling documentary short Night and Fog that revealed archival footage and stills taken in the concentration camps. The prologue is a masterful example of this technique, and it continues until the final frame. We hear much more than we can see, and this audio-sensory approach gives Son of Saul its haunting power and unique clarity on historicity. Nemes’ masterstroke is the use of sound to amplify the film’s limited visual scope.
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Their ashes are then dumped into a nearby river. The intention is to bring both narrative threads together and set them against the film’s rigourous aesthetic, one that depicts with confronting immediacy the dehumanizing ‘journey’ of executing thousands of people – we follow the fated as they disembark from cattle trains, rushed into the gas chambers, before their lifeless bodies are burned in the crematorium. Nemes’ film is also about a discreetly planned uprising by the Sonderkommandos, who know that their days are numbered.ĭirector Laszlo Nemes cited Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1985) as an inspiration for his film. This is a man so afflicted by severe trauma that he believes in providing for the dead more than fighting for his own, and his peers’, survival. Son of Saul centers on Saul’s obsession with finding a Yiddish rabbi to give a particular dead boy, whom he thinks is his son, a proper religious burial. This is a narrative that is rarely afforded the big screen treatment (some more high-profile ones include the Oscar-winning documentary The Last Days (1998) and the dramatized The Grey Zone (2001)), let alone envisioned from the vantage point of one person’s subjective experience of hell on earth. He does what he is told – anything less or more will cost him his life.Īs we learn, Sonderkommandos are Jews forced to work with the Nazis to assist in executing their own race. After all, he is a Sonderkommando he cannot afford to be overtly curious. We see him up-close, and we experience his limited vision. From then on, he is framed in a loose close-up with shallow depth of field throughout the entire film. We meet Geza Rohrig’s character, Saul, from the get-go as he walks towards the camera into focus. Nemes’ work here far exceeds what can be done with the subject matter, turning it into something that will haunt you for many days. Comparisons will be made to such works as Schindler’s List (1993) or The Pianist(2002), but such comparisons do not yield any more insight than pitting an autobiography against a graphic novel.
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It is a Holocaust picture unlike any before it. Winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Son of Saul ought to have won the Palme d’Or over Dheepan (2015), but at least the former now has an Oscar in its belt. I have not seen something as intense and shattering as Laszlo Nemes’ feature debut for a long time. Son of Saul is the best film of the year. (Reviewed at The Projector – first published )