Son of Saul (2015)

11.00pm, Sunday, BBC Two

“Rabbi, help me bury a body” It’s not often that you o er ve stars to a movie and then admit that you never want to sit through it again, but Son of Saul is just such a movie. László Nemes’ remarkable debut, a Cannes and Oscar-winner, is a harrowing tale of life and death in Auschwitz-Birkenau. We’ve seen Holocaust dramas before but none like this one. The story chronicles two days in the life of Saul (the brilliant Géza Röhrig), a member of the camp’s Sonderkommando, the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers, collecting clothes, scrubbing showers and disposing of bodies. It’s a nightmare scenario made all the more traumatic by the director’s decision to lm everything hand-held from Saul’s point of view. As a result of these claustrophobic close-ups, we nd ourselves, like Saul, a spectator in hell. Wisely, Nemses chooses to a ord us only blurred glimpses of the horrors faced by Saul and his co-workers every day. After all, we know what’s happening and no ctional representation could ever be more harrowing than the records of reality. There is a plot-line here – Saul thinks he recognises his own son among the corpses and seeks to give him a proper burial – but Son of Saul is less concerned with narrative than with taking the viewer on a voyage into the heart of darkness. And in this it succeeds in spades.