Son of Saul Review: How human feelings survive in a death factory

Son of Saul (Saul fia) is a Hungaryan drama film directed by László Nemes and co-written by Nemes and Clara Royer. The film concentrates on one main character, Saul Auslander (played by Geza Rohrig in a riveting performance), prisoner at Auschwitz in 1944 and a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners given humiliating and illusory privileges as trusties, with the desperate job of cleaning out the bodies in the death chambers. When he comes across a young boy convinced that the boy was his son (which the film wisely never confirms nor disproves) Saul becomes obsessed with giving the child a proper Jewish burial rather than letting him go into a mass grave or the crematorium. And so the film unfolds, as Saul pursues the one goal that's still meaningful to him. He's deadened, certainly, but not immune to the horror of what he's doing, or insensitive about the suffering around him. He's just learned to tamp down on any emotional reaction in order to keep himself going from day to day.

Son Of Saul is the rare Holocaust drama that finds actual drama, much clearer than it is case in other films about the Holocaust. Nemes shows us that Happening in Nazi camps happened to all of us, the whole humanity. The film shows that some human feelings could survive in such a death factory but for survivors, this world would never be as colorful as it used to. And that is exactly what the viewer leaves „frozen“. For most of the film, Nemes shows us Saul’s agonized face, in a shallow focus, tracked through long takes, with the surrounding and background details often left blurred or indistinctly glimpsed: a muzzle flash, a uniform, a naked body. Sometimes we see his back, with the red X marked on his jacket to indicate his status. His is a face from which all emotion appears to have been scorched away – it looks like the face of a pterodactyl. 

One of the most devastating and deeply shocking aspects of Son of Saul is that it begins with a gas chamber scene; another film might have opted to end with this kind of scenario, or to finish just before showing it. The film has an unique approach to the concentration camps. Shot on a tightly framed 35mm hand-held camera, but it still stands passively still for nearly two minutes, the photography is almost always focused on Saul, leaving the atrocities off screen or out of focus, but often vividly audible. If there is any complaint, it's that the editing suffers from its long-take construction, but the sound design is really great. Saul's face remains stoic, leaving his mournful expression to interpretation. While he's apparently numb, he's always fully invested in the moment. Having worked for the excellent Hungarian director Béla Tarr, his influence is clearly felt here. Tarr also uses long shots and utilities impassive protagonists but Nemes' work is much more dense, engaging, and arguably accessible in its own way but mostly for the immediate empathy the situation earns.

Rating: 8.5/10