Son Of Saul
Matters of life and death…
Out of respect for the dead, and shame at what was done to them, Holocaust literature is full of gaps, ellipses and silences – how, after all, do you say the unspeakable? When it comes to cinema, the question gets even thornier: how do you show the unshowable? And how can you not?
For his harrowing debut, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (and the Grand Prix at Cannes), Hungarian writer/director László Nemes has a brutal solution. Like an Iñárritu action sequence stripped of all dazzle and stretched out to two hours, Son Of Saul throws us straight into the maelstrom of concentration-camp life as if we, too, were prisoners. Saul Ausländer (poet Géza Röhrig), is a Sonderkomando, a Jewish trustee co-opted by the Nazis. We first meet him shepherding new arrivals into the showers, removing their valuables, then piling up the bodies afterwards. When he recognises his son among the corpses, he sets out to secure him a proper Jewish burial. For the next 24 hours, Mátyás Erdély’s dogged camera barely leaves Saul’s side, so we only see what he sees – already far too much.
With its boxed-in ratio and ugly, seemingly endless takes, the result is a worm’s-eye view of evil on an industrial scale. As Saul searches for a rabbi, we glimpse blurry Brueghelian nightmares of bonfires and burning bodies soundtracked by distant gunshots and ragged screams. The crushing irony, of course, is that Saul’s mission is futile – nobody’s getting out of here alive, and the dead boy may not even be his son. But just because it’s futile doesn’t mean its pointless: stubbornly clinging to the corpse is Saul’s attempt to remain human in the face of mass dehumanisation. By placing us, helpless, in his shoes, Nemes makes us both victim and perpetrator – all complicit, all trapped, all cogs in the same awful machine. THE VERDICT A film to make your blood run cold, Nemes’ first-person account of life, and death, in a concentration camp contains horrors you can’t – and shouldn’t – unsee. › Certificate 15 Director László Nemes Starring Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak Screenplay László Nemes, Clara Royer Distributor Curzon Artificial Eye Running Time 107 mins