Review: Son of Saul

Son of Saul (15)

Hungary 2015  106 minutes Subtitles Dir: László Nemes  Starring: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak, Sándor Zsótér

From the outset, Matyas Erdely’s camera maintains its close focus on Saul Auslander (Röhrig). Indeed, we see so much of the back of his head over the next 100 minutes or so that you could be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a Dardenne brothers film. After he walks briskly into focus in the lengthy opening sequence, we follow impassive Saul as he goes about his daily work. Since this is October 1944 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, his job entails herding the latest arrivals from their trains, helping them strip naked as they’re told cruel lies about showering before being set to work, and slamming the gas chamber doors shut behind them. Even as they start screaming and beating desperately on the walls, Saul and his colleagues start pulling their clothes from pegs and rifling through them in search of valuables.

So far, so fairly conventional harrowing Holocaust drama. Except that Saul Auslander is a Hungarian Jew – one of dozens of mostly Jewish inmates in the Sonderkommando, who do the Nazis’ dirty work for them in exchange for, at best, four extra months of life. Their many tasks include burning bodies and shovelling the ashes into a nearby lake. When a young boy barely survives the gas chamber, Saul watches as a Nazi officer suffocates him. He then becomes convinced that the kid is his son and sets out single-mindedly, and at great personal risk, to find a rabbi who’s prepared to conduct a proper funeral service. This brings him into conflict with fellow members of the Sonderkommando, who are fomenting a rebellion in which Saul has a key role to play.

First-time director László Nemes has been vocal in his criticism of Spielberg’s ‘sentimental’ Schindler’s List. Having put his money where his mouth is, he’s won both an Oscar and universal praise – even from notoriously disapproving Claude Lanzmann, whose Shoah is widely considered to be the definitive Holocaust documentary. That’s despite taking several risks, one of which is to keep most of the horrors offscreen while we admire Saul’s ears. The film’s virtually square Academy ratio, shallow depth of field and almost total absence of long shots means that we only occasionally glimpse out-of-focus corpses (or ‘pieces’ as they’re referred to in the dehumanising language of the camp). Instead, Nemes relies upon very effective sound design to create a sense of intense immersion in Saul’s nightmare world. Occasionally this proves disorienting and makes it unclear what’s going on, which is presumably intentional. We also never find out whether the dead boy to whom Saul becomes so devoted is really his son, though this seems rather unlikely. What’s more, as played by poet and actor Géza Röhrig, the character is often hard to read, which makes empathy something of a challenge, especially when he’s accused of having “failed the living for the dead”.

Of course, Son of Saul raises many moral questions to which there are no authoritative answers. To his credit, Nemes doesn’t pretend otherwise and refuses to trade in false hope, which may prove unpopular among those who demand pat homilies, emotional uplift and unambiguous acts of heroism from their Holocaust dramas. For everyone else, this is a visceral, unflinching and bravely provocative contribution to a subject about which one might have been forgiven for thinking there was nothing more to say.