‘We are dead already…’
There aren’t many holocaust films out there. The thought of taking arguably the most despicable act of degradation ever committed and repackaging it in the name of entertainment clearly doesn’t sit well, even after all these years. It takes a special kind of filmmaker and a special kind of film to do the subject matter justice. Enter Laszlo Nemes and Son of Saul…
Saul (Geza Rohrig) is a Jewish-Hungarian Sonderkommando in a Nazi concentration camp. Upon discarding the bodies of the gassed Jews that have just arrived at the camp, Saul becomes monomaniacally obsessed with giving the corpse of a young boy a proper burial. Through Saul’s quest, we see the abject horror of the camps laid bare.
Son of Saul was Nemes’ first feature film and it will go down as one of the most acclaimed debuts of all time. A winner at both the Oscars and at Cannes, it is easy to see why audiences and critics alike were so enraptured with the film. Nemes has the camera stick to Saul like glue throughout the picture. This has the eerie effect of forcing the viewer down into the mud with the prisoners. We eat with them, we sleep with them, and, ultimately, we die with them. The icy touch of death is never far away from Saul’s peripheral vision, even though we rarely see it up close. This evokes a sense of claustrophobic panic that is only exasperated by the weary, horror marked faces of Saul and those around him.
This is not a Sunday afternoon film by any means (although I did coincidentally watch it on a Sunday afternoon – gonna be a rough Monday morning tomorrow…), it isn’t a popcorn movie, nobody fires lasers out of their hands, but in its own quiet way, Son of Saul is a remarkable picture. This one will stay with you long after the credits have rolled. A groundbreaking and courageous movie.